March of the Cuddly-Wuddly Documentaries

"I don't call it a documentary," says Leipzig. "I call it a 'wildlife adventure,' because this is a movie you go to because it's fun and entertaining, not because it's, quote, good for you."

As Leipzig readily acknowledges, this new brand of storytelling has longstanding precedent. Disney (where Leipzig worked for some time) has been making anthropomorphic animated and live-action features for generations. For 1989's "Milo & Otis," Columbia Pictures turned a Japanese nature movie about a cat and dog into an American hit with new music and narration from Dudley Moore. And the late "Crocodile Hunter" naturalist-showman Steve Irwin, whose programs were a cult hit on Discovery's Animal Planet, changed the way people perceive wildlife shows in general.

"I think of our new genre," says Leipzig, who oversaw "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" and "Dead Poets Society" as a Disney executive, "as reinventing both the documentaries and the adventure movies of the past."

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This reinvention brings with it some intriguing artistic -- and ethical -- challenges, as the films try to walk the line between documentary integrity and fictionalized drama. In other words (arguably), between harsh reality and entertaining cheese.

Leipzig and Bunting are happy to address the issue. "The audience gets a really deep connection with the characters of the animals," Leipzig says of "Arctic Tale." He notes that Latifah is a "storyteller" rather than a narrator. "And Queen Latifah is wise, funny and earthy, with a contemporary sense of humor and perspective. She's not some third person behind a wall of glass, removed from the experiences of the creatures." Regarding the audience-friendly qualities in "Kalahari," Bunting allows that the meerkats "have names, as they do in the series, but everything they do is based on natural-history behavior."

Then there are the filmmakers who spent a decade and a half in the Frozen North shooting "Arctic Tale" (they live on Vancouver Island). Leipzig recruited Robertson (who made the film with her husband, cinematographer and co-director Ravetch), Robertson thinks, because she'd made several documentaries for National Geographic Television that had employed the animal-point-of-view concept he was seeking.

In short order, Robertson found herself negotiating between her old-school documentary skills and the new demands for big-screen entertainment.

All parties -- Robertson, Ravetch, National Geographic Films and Paramount Classics -- agreed that the film needed to de-emphasize the animals' need to kill for food, a necessary activity for polars and walruses in the wilds, but a little too much for G-rated audiences.

"Certainly in documentary television, you see a lot more predation, a lot more red snow," says Robertson. "But we had to consider that on the big screen, that can be very graphic as well, so we purposely stayed away from that. But it was really important for us to show that animals get eaten, that it's part of what goes on. We didn't want to pretend it doesn't happen."

The result: "Arctic" shows one red-snow scene, but at a distance.

When Paramount Classics asked Robertson to include recognizable hits such as "We Are Family" and "Celebration" on the soundtrack, however, she was less agreeable. "They wanted audiences to recognize songs. . . . We wanted acoustic songs."