Oceans from Disney Nature

After wowing us in the skies with “Winged Migration,” the two Jacques (Perrin and Cluzaud) are back to entice us to gaze in the opposite direction. In “Oceans,” Disneynature’s reconstitution of the 2009 French release “Océans,” the filmmakers venture in, on and around our seas to discover photogenic oddities and endangered wonders.

All the crystalline imagery and poetic immediacy that we have come to expect from this new generation of up-close-and-personal nature documentaries is here. Horseshoe crabs scuttle like possessed Nazi helmets and a school of fish morphs from dreidel to disco ball, as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley.

Moving from the infinitesimal to the gargantuan — from sea urchin larvae to 120-ton blue whales — the filmmakers work tirelessly to parallel their undersea world with the larger universe, offering genteel reminders of our mutual dependence.

Playing down the cruel (baby turtles running the gantlet of dive-bombing frigate birds) without overdoing the cute (a mommy-and-me walrus cuddle-fest), “Oceans” is almost too soothing.

“Human indifference is surely the oceans’ greatest threat,” murmurs Pierce Brosnan’s excruciatingly bland narration while images of the garbage patch in the North Pacific Gyre float on screen.

Reviews of the original film suggest a somewhat harsher environmental message (for example, a sequence showing several extinct species has, um, disappeared), but the poor bluefin tuna have survived the Disneynature editors if not the nets of bottom-trawling fishing boats. In any case, that lone supermarket cart sitting forlornly on the ocean floor says it all. 

The Review is from The New York Times