Ever watched two penguins fall in love?
Just wait. Thanks to Disneynature’s new film, “Penguins,” all eyes are on Steve and Adeline’s Antarctic meet-cute.
Out of hundreds of thousands of penguins who appear in the documentary-style film (in theaters Wednesday), it’s the often-clueless, 5-year-old Steve (voiced by the film’s narrator, Ed Helms) who emerges a movie star as he journeys into parenthood.
At 2 feet tall and roughly 15 pounds, the male Adélie penguin attracted filmmakers’ attention in the icy climate from the start.
“He was amazing, because he would go down the slope and mutter to himself in a grumpy way,” chuckles co-director Jeff Wilson. Even when sitting in a sea of up to 500,000 penguins, “what you notice when you spend an enormous amount of time like we do is that the penguins have very distinct characters.”
And so the filmmakers began rooting for Steve, who had traveled back from his winter migration to the penguins’ nesting ground in hopes of becoming a first-time father. But first, he had to land a lady – by impressing her with a sturdy nest he’d built of rocks.
“When you see females coming and assessing the nest site, they’re checking out the males’ nest choice and nest location, and deciding if the males are suitable based on that,” says Wilson, who laughs recalling how Steve, who was late to the game and occasionally short on rocks, fared in that particular mating ritual. “We would watch that (scenario) time and time again … thinking, ‘Come on, dude, you’ve really got to pull it out of the bag.’ ”
To capture footage in the 76-minute “Penguins,” which includes the hatching of Steve and Adeline’s two chicks (and danger lurking nearby from predatory birds and hungry leopard seals), filmmakers camped out in Antarctica in tents for months, where 24-hour daylight was a constant and temperatures dipped to 40 below.
And although adorable, penguins don’t exactly smell like roses.
Thanks to their habit of regurgitating food when threatened – or as a means of feeding their young – “they smell absolutely horrendous!” Wilson says. “Imagine if you went to a fishmonger’s and you left all the fish out in the sun for three to four days, and you put it in a blender and spread it across a patio or onto your trousers.”
Yikes.
And yet, none of this affects the feathered love story that is Steve and Adeline.
Penguins mate for life, and “once they’ve paired, they can find each other among the chaos in the penguin colony time and time again,” says Wilson.
And in this animal kingdom, penguin parents divide their duties up pretty evenly. “They get a schedule,” says Wilson. “They seem to know how long the other one can last watching out for the chicks and the eggs before slipping out and restocking on (food). They seem to have an understanding right from the beginning just how long the other can last.”
