What I've been watching

March of the Penguins, which my brother gave me for Xmas. (Yes, I've got a bit of a backlog. It's got nothing on my books backlog.)

There's some excellent footage, and they don't pretend the penguins mate for life, or cover up all the natural sound with music and voiceover (oh, Hollywood, what low standards I've got used to).

The Hollywood twee wasn't as egregious as I thought it might be; there are lines like "the reunion is a joyous one", which is ... kinda plausible, really.

But then, near the end their anthropomorphicness -ity -ization does a flip and it's suddenly wrong and jarring.

First, it's "unimaginable" that a mother penguin who's lost her chick tries to steal somebody else's. Um, maybe if you have no imagination. That must have sensitised me to the comment a bit later where it's "surprising" that mothers and chicks are so closely bonded when they've only known each other a few days. Now I'm not a particularly observant person and have zero maternal instincts, but hello-o-o-o, Earth to scriptwriter: let me send you a copy of "Evolution for Beginners".

Assuming Morgan Freeman didn't write his own narration, I couldn't spot who did in the credits; am I being tewwibly gender-essentialist in guessing it was a man?