Opening on Earth Day, April 22, earth puts its movie-and-TV-series money -- forty million dollars, the most ever for a documentary -- where its mouth is. A tree is to be planted for every opening weekend ticket, and -- no trees harmed in the making of this picture -- no paper press information has been distributed. The Disneynature high-tech return to that studio’s lauded 1949-60 True-Life Adventure series is co-directors/-writers’ Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield’s theatrical version of their TV Planet Earth, five years’ work distilling from 4,500 days of shooting (250 of them aerial) at over 200 locations.

Though both polar bear cubs survive as exceptions to James Earl Jones’s narrational “unlikely” and deaths are implicit everywhere in the screen migrations, the camera stops milliseconds short of actual blood in father bear’s wounding and starvation, a uniquely captured cheetah chase, and great white shark’s seal-mouthed breaching. Filming from above Everest was so dangerous and impractical as to depend on Nepalese army spy planes, and footage beside end-credits records the Arctic team’s close encounter with a curious hungry bear and, following African kids’ laughter, a potentially disastrous hot-air balloon brush with a tree.

But this is a kid- and family-friendly hour-and-a-half, a rarity in getting in without hammering climate-change cautions and in acknowledging that out there alongside the cuddly, is a claw-and-fang of predators and prey. Many of its subjects will die so that many others, of all species, survive from decay and renewal.

That cycle is the structure, writ large for Earth as a whole in the seasonal variations coming from an axis tilt of twenty-three-and-a-half degrees. Passing from twenty-four-hour winter nights and equally long summer days at the extreme Poles, from Arctic to Antarctic and back again -- “From Pole to Pole” was the first of the TV series -- from vegetation-less to non-edible conifer fir belts on through wide-leaf temperate zones to tropical rain forests, it traces fauna through flora and through the abundance -- or not -- of sun and water (or excess of either).

It is lamentable that documentarians and cartoonists alike seem unable to rise above anthropomorphizing anything that moves. To uncalled-for music and faux-Yiddish, a Fantasia-dancing New Guinea bird of paradise is demeaned as a male out to impress his hot date; to mock disclaimer “unlike humans,” bear cubs “don’t listen to” their dam; gratuitous obligatory penguins at least are not “our tuxedoed friends” as in equally sinning March of the Penguins.

Three “moms” and their offspring are the focus. Arctic polar bears emerging from buried hibernation to seek the sea and food; thousands of elephants and their calves on the enormous trek through scrub-dry Kalahari and marauding lions to inland oasis at Botswana’s Okavango Swamp-Delta; and a humpback whale and her young one on the longest of marine migrations, from tropical breeding grounds to the krill- and nutrient-rich waters of South Polar seas.

Other species are included, but not dwelt on, like Demoiselle cranes in life-or-death flight over the planet’s highest mountains; and Mandarin duck chicks belly flopping on maiden flight dives. Some need cutting, period, such as unconnected penguins and the great white intended to imply the whales’ promised but never seen dangers.

Sections of earth have aired on television, so many will skip the film and, sadly, miss the experience outside their living rooms and larger than life in big-screen visuals and sounds. For in spite of the awful narration scripted by the directors with Leslie Megahey and of the unimaginative score, the film is one that needs to be seen to be believed.

Relying on time-lapse -- don’t miss those fungi! -- satellite, helicopter and balloon, on wet suits, high-speed film and night vision lenses, without a frame of camera or computer trickery, the crystal-definition documentary is a miracle for the eye in its portrayal of the miracle that is this “Lucky Planet.” In the intimacy of close-ups, in medium shots or panoramas of infinitudes of flying creatures or overheads of migrating quadrupeds, or under the ocean among swordfish, it bears testimony to the multiplicity that is perpetuation. With animals and plants, it draws attention to the cycle of ice, cloud, water, and there is one circling composite sequence of falling waters that’s dizzying in its magnificence. Stars Mother Nature and the photography deserve standing applause. 

(Released by Walt Disney Pictures and rated "G" by  MPAA.)