Winged Migration is a 2001 film directed by Jacques Cluzaud, Michel Debats, and Jacques Perrin.
It is a documentary feature about migrating birds. The film shows various species of birds and how they migrate from place to place. This is illustrated with close-up shots of birds in flight, around the world. There are a few shots of birds in urban areas but most of the film shows natural landscapes—the deserts of the American Southwest and North Africa, Antarctic islands, European river valleys, and more.
Tropes:
- Blade-of-Grass Cut: Some extreme close-ups of birds, and other shots of nature, like the close-up of a bee on a flower.
- Book Ends: The ending has the narrator observing that "a year has passed" and birds have returned to the same spring habitats they were at in the beginning. This is accompanied by footage from the same place as in the beginning, a rural farmhouse by a stream, where geese land in the water and robins feed their young.
- Desert Skull: A chyron about how waders migrate 6200 miles from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert is followed by a shot of the bones and feathers of a long-dead bird lying on the desert sand.
- Eiffel Tower Effect: Used for a few of the shots of birds in urban areas, like when a shot of birds swooping down a river in a city turns to show the Eiffel Tower itself, or another shot shows the skyline of Lower Manhattan in New York City.
- Green Aesop: One scene shows a bird getting stuck in the sludgy waste that has been extruded from some kind of factory, left behind when its mates fly away.
- Manipulative Editing:
- Much of the film was shot with "tame" birds that the filmmakers personally raised for the very purpose of making this movie.
- Many shots were staged. The shot where a very clever parrot works a latch and lets itself out of a cage was obviously staged, with cameras perfectly placed to show the bird lifting the latch and flying away. One scene shows a bird with an injured wing being stalked by crabs on the beach, followed by what appears to be the crabs eating the bird's carcass—in fact the filmmakers rescued the bird and the crabs are shown eating a dead fish. The shot of the bird stuck in industrial sludge was staged as well, with the filmmakers deliberately placing the bird in the sludge, only to take it out and clean it off after the cameras stopped rolling.
- Mood Whiplash: One scene shows a flock of birds flying down a river valley, in all their majesty and wonder—until a gunshot rings out and one of them falls out of the sky. The camera then pans down to show hunters, their guns raised.
- Narrator: Jacques Perrin, one of the directors, provides bits of narration, like when he observes that birds sense the Earth's magnetic field to guide themselves when migrating.
- Nature Documentary: A study of birds in flight, and specifically, their migratory patterns.
- Polar Penguins: A sequence about the birds of Antarctica features, you guessed it, penguins, rockhopper penguins, swimming in the sea before coming ashore onto the rocks of some remote Antarctic island. (The filmmakers were unable to get footage of the most famous penguins, the emperor penguins that were later shown in nature documentary March of the Penguins.)
- Scenery Porn: Shot after shot after jaw-dropping shot of birds flying over gorgeous river valleys, snowy mountains, and other scenes of wondrous nature.
- Seasonal Baggage: The film opens with a shot of a stream in some bucolic rural setting, in the dead of winter with snow everywhere. Then the film cuts to the exact same shot, but in spring when everything is green.
- Total Eclipse of the Plot: There is a random close-up shot of the sun in total eclipse, seemingly only to establish a mystic mood.
