The birds stand nearly four-feet high and weigh anywhere from 45 to 100 pounds. They are most comfortable in water where they can dive to depths of 1,400 feet and stay there for as long as 20 minutes at a time in their search for the calamari and fish that sustains them. But every March, the adult birds begin a long, single-file procession that lasts until April as they head for their breeding grounds. Once the female lays her egg, she passes it to the feet of the male. It's his job to sit on it and hatch it and keep the young one safe and protected; the female returns home to hunt for food. She'll be back to feed the little one, but in the meantime, the male must endure the winter winds (in a storm, they can rage up to 150 mph) and chill, as his stored fat drops inexorably away.

Jacquet and his crew spent 13 months in Antarctica in order to catch one complete breeding cycle. While the penguins' steadfastness in repeating this harsh cycle over and over again for thousands of years is something of a miracle, Jacquet's dedication in capturing their story is feat in itself. His camera captures the birds from the ocean's edge along their epic march to their rookery, and while a diving crew follows the mothers back into the ocean's depths as they hunt for food, cameras are also on hand to capture the males' miserable huddle as they tend their eggs and chicks among the blinding snow. He is on the scene to witness the chicks pecking their way out of their eggs, as well as their first peeks out from under the down of their fathers' bellies. And there is a crew on hand to catch a leopard seal preying on the swimming females and a petrel descending from the sky, its site set on the furry, gray penguin chicks.

These birds are naturally photogenic, intrinsically comical, and frankly adorable. Jacquet artfully exploits these traits, emphasizing the humor of their clumsy waddle and the way they slide on their bellies when they get tired during their lengthy trip to the breeding ground. He aims his cameras at the chicks as they take their first stumbling steps and flap their useless wings. The narration stresses the dangers the birds face in their struggle to breed and the images limn some of that. The aforementioned predators, the blizzards blowing through the massed birds and coating the shivering animals with ice and snow, the tragedy of an egg rolling off its parent's feet on the ground and instantly freezing. But even with all that melodrama, what shines through is the penguins charm and the triumph of their survival.

When Jacquet premiered the film at the Sundance Film Festival in January, it was with a different soundtrack, and with actors voicing the penguins' thoughts. That bit of anthropomorphism has been jettisoned in favor of a more traditional voiceover narration by Morgan Freeman. While the original voiceover idea sounds as if it might have been too cute for words, hopefully, we'll get a chance to judge it as an alternative audio track on the eventual DVD. The new version—in spite of Freeman's silken voice—is a bit on the dry side, unfortunately calling to mind PBS and the Discovery Channel, which may lead some to think this might have been better off being relegated to television. But that would have been a tragedy. Blown up to big-screen proportions, one can see how plush the birds' feathers are; they really are handsome beings. More than that, the journey the penguins go through and the sacrifices they make are something special and deserving of the full theatrical treatment. And let's not forget, March of the Penguins is one of the few films out this summer that every member of the family will enjoy. Now, that's worth making the long march to the theater, isn't it?