An 'Arctic Tale' for the Whole Family

Focus Is on Bears, Walruses and Kids

Filming walruses in the Arctic requires skill, patience and a little luck. (Photos By Arctic Bear Productions)

The Arctic, says filmmaker Sarah Robertson, is a vast, icy playground of opportunity.

Yes, freezing temperatures are the norm, parts of winter are nonstop nighttime, and the 4 million native people and more than 40 types of mammals sometimes battle for survival in a vastly changing environment.

But this region at the top of the world -- which includes parts of Canada, Alaska, Russia, Greenland and Scandinavia -- has a strange allure for the Canadian filmmaker and her family.

"The Arctic is a great place for kids," Robertson says. "The Inuit [native people] have so many kids. They love children. . . . They don't push them to the sides. They're upfront and involved in everything."

Co-directors Robertson and husband Adam Ravetch spent much of the past 15 years filming scenes that are in "Arctic Tale," a movie opening tomorrow. Their Arctic adventures sometimes included their 12-year-old son, Cooper, and daughters Rosie and Jessica, ages 6 and 5.

"My kids run with the [Inuit] kids. During the 24-hour sunlight they are out playing at midnight, doing their own thing, with their own group of friends, learning how to hunt and fish," Robertson says. "My son still associates mustard with seal intestine. They're eating fun things, and as long as I bring mustard and ketchup along, they're cool."

In a similar way, Robertson and Ravetch found a kid-friendly way to spice up their "Arctic Tale" message. The heart-tugging story of a polar bear cub named Nanu and a walrus pup named Seela is sprinkled with toe-tapping pop songs and joke-filled narration by Queen Latifah. This helps make viewers care about the film's closing question: Will the Arctic be ice-free by the year 2040?

"We wanted people to be emotionally involved and trying to understand what it would be like to be these animals," Robertson says.

The filmmakers took more than 800 hours of often-spectacular footage of ferocious walruses and polar bears on ice floes and deep in the ocean.

To get that footage, they had to:

· Take chances. Ravetch braved water temperatures of 29 degrees for underwater shots of the 2,000-pound tusked walruses.

· Be patient. Some 30-day periods had just four good days of shooting.

· Be a bit lucky. One of the best scenes in the movie -- Nanu holding on to her mother's fur -- was captured after three weeks of searching for polar bears in minus-40-degree weather.

Robertson recalls not being able to find any bears: "Then at night, we're in a tent [and] these little animals come to us, checking us out. And the cubs get caught up and twisted in the guy wires. . . . The whole tent is shaking, and the mother bear is roaring, telling the cubs to get away. And you think the mother bear is going to come right through the tent.

"They were able to get away without incident, but we got no sleep -- and no footage."

But the next morning, the crew followed the bears' pawprints and found the mother and babies resting.

"Finally, you get these nuggets if you keep on believing you're going to get something and [are] ready," Robertson says. "Encounters come without warning, and sometimes they are really fabulous."

-- Scott Moore