Wildlife photographers Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson’s Arctic Tale is a cuddly family film that touches on the dangers of claw and fang, contains a clear global warming caution and concludes with a dozen cute kids giving ecology energy-saving tips atop the end credits. Ravetch and Robertson are careful to integrate the film’s not gruesome deaths into the cycle of survival.

There are scenes inside snow dens and burrows and underwater where freezing temperatures were added to the photographer’s peril of losing his surfacing hole in the fairyland ice cover, but the husband and wife team avoid gimmicks and let their stars act out a timeless cycle now menaced by climatic change but adaptable in the past. Working and camping in Canada’s desolate far north, without blinds or other subterfuges, crew and guides braved climate, terrain and predators in gaining, if not exactly their subjects’ trust, at least sufficient accustomed indifference to human presence which resulted in the recording of what may be described as “family intimacy.”

For box-office appeal, the big screen loads wisecracking anthropomorphic animated features with star voices, and serious documentary does the same, often using recognizable pop songs into the bargain. Morgan Freeman’s bland telling about “our tuxedoed friends” distracts and detracts from obvious parallel March of the Penguins, and, though a more sympathetic voice, Queen Latifah’s is heard too much in Arctic Tale, belaboring in false-note “with-it” terms what can easily be seen.

Born about the same time, polar bear cub Nanu and walrus calf Seela are raised by their mothers during a childhood apprenticeship of two to four years, long by many other species’ standards. Selected down to a lean eighty-four minutes, the tale does not spend itself in the facile spectacular, instead giving just enough of sunsets, auroras and fine wind-whipped snow, of crazily bobbing ice blocks and melting ice rivers calving bergs, jellyfish and ivory-tusked “sea unicorn” narwhals and snow foxes. It touches, too, but does not dwell, on death, part and parcel of life, from exhausted starvation in the case of Nanu’s weaker twin brother and what is portrayed as sacrifice in that of Seela’s “Auntie,” in the food chain where “a single death preserves the lives of others.”

Footage assembled to have it appear that the very same two mammal youngsters cross paths on the unusually far offshore refuge of Rock Island, the story is of parental love, solely maternal for the bears and familial for the charmingly barbershop-whiskered herd-living walruses. Protection and instruction of the offspring, and thus continuation of the species, is endangered by the second (but not secondary) concern, climate change. Whether the warming is a repeated natural cycle, human-induced, or a combination,  above the sixty-sixth parallel, land and sea ice have shrunk with overwhelming effects in the biologically rich north.

Longer, warmer summers, shorter winters, more fragile formation of sea ice, thinning permafrost, increasing scarcity of food, no longer tenable migration routes -- all these contribute to a confusion of instinct, as, for example, to save their offspring,  bear mothers force their cubs out earlier on their own.

Intelligent enough not to whine its alarm, Arctic Tale quietly incorporates it. The story geared to the young, with simply put cautionary remedies, Ravetch and Robertson do not horrify with any doomsday mentality. New generations are born, and, with whatever hardship, sacrifice and change, the odds till now are in favor of survival. 

(Released by National Geographic Films and Paramount Classics; rated “G” as suitable for all age groups.)