I just watched March of the Penguins. It was terrible.

Too long. Too draggy (the two are not the same). Too anthropomorphic. Too much French existentialism. Too much of the 7-year-old French girl singing trite lyrics which don't match the music. Too much trance/New Age music (I bet they want to sell their OST).

You come out of the cinema hall knowing very little more about the Emperor Penguins than when you first entered. "National Geographic for idiots", as my sister pronounced it. No wonder it's so popular in the USA.

The cinematography wasn't bad, but it's nothing you can't find in your run-of-the-mill nature documentaries. All in all, it'd have been better if they'd wiped the audio track, made many judicious cuts and got David Attenborough in to do the narration.

(Then again, watching the trailer for the English version narrated by Morgan Freeman on Apple.com, devoid of the improbable soliloquies of French-speaking penguins, with a different and less annoying soundtrack and produced by National Geographic films, you'd think it was for a totally different show. And so perhaps it is.)