Earth, The Most Green Inspired Movie

Earth is a spectacular new documentary made by the BBC that follows the lives of three wild animals over a year. Created by the BBC's Natural History Unit in parallel with the award-winning TV series 'Planet Earth', its production statistics are staggering. It took five years to make, with 40 specialist camera crews spending 4,500 days in the field (including 250 days of aerial photography), filming in 200 locations across 26 countries. It tracks polar bears in the Arctic, elephants in the Kalahari and a humpback whale, through the trials and tribulations of 4 seasons in their lives. The narration is not delivered by Sir David Attenborough, as in the television series. Instead, the velvety tones of Star Trek 's Patrick Stewart have been employed and, while much of the narration merely reinforces what we are looking at, it does toss out one startling statistic.

The baby polar bears stick their little noses out of their cave into the light and tumble down hills of snow. Forests bloom from snow drops to blue bells to daffodils in an instant. Shot in 200 locations worldwide, the details of wildlife in their habitat are fascinating. Magnificently plumed birds of Paradise do a mating dance in the rain forest of New Guinea and three million caribou flee for their lives with killer wolves in hot pursuit.

A humpback whale is tracked as it swims with its calf from the warm waters of the equator to the turbulent Southern Ocean, where the two find food before turning around and heading all the way back again. African elephants are shown making their punishing march across the Kalahari Desert to the waters of the Okavango Delta. At one stage, desperate for a drink, they have to share a waterhole with a pride of lions. By day their calves are safe, but in the dark the cameras enable us to watch as the lions go on the prowl, forcing the elephants to use their bodies as a protective barrier around their young. It is a long, hard night. The film does find time for a little comedy, when some non-swimming baboons diffidently wade into the delta's waters, flapping their paws in distaste at having to undergo the ordeal. The epic sequence in which a migrating flock of demoiselle cranes flies over Mount Everest, for instance, is the first of its kind. It was filmed through an open door of a Nepalese bomber at an altitude of 28,000 feet.