Year:  1996
Genre:  Documentary, Nature
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Bugs!
Directors:  Claude Nuridsany, Marie Perennou
Run time:  80 minutes
DVD distributor:  Alliance Films

     To celebrate Earth Day, coming up in a couple of weeks, Alliance Films released a few nature documentaries in environmentally friendly packaging (which really means cardboard) on April 10^th.  One of them is the Blu-Ray of a film called Microcosmos, a documentary about insects and plant life in extreme close-up.

     Well…actually, I don’t know if you could really call it a documentary, since it has precious little narration.  Almost none in fact.  It just lets the camera do most of the talking , zooming in super-close on the coolest beetles and worms and caterpillars and mosquitos and so forth, and just…watching them. 

     Without narration, my wife found the whole thing super-boring.  She wanted to know what every beetle was, and what they were doing.  For me, it was actually a really interesting idea, and I found the movie fascinating.  The world of Microcosmos is stunning up close, and the only real effects that seem to have been added are changes in camera speed when the snails aren’t moving fast enough or the spiders are moving too fast.  It creates an incredible scene that absolutely immersed me from the start.

     You remember when there was a strike at the CBC, and they started showing CFL games without commentators or play-by-play guys?  It was actually kinda nice to watch, it felt very different.  Microcosmos is the same.  It takes a second to get used to, then it is an absolute joy as it inspects the insect kingdom in magnificent Blu-Ray high definition.  It’s wonderful.

     It’s also possible that I just didn’t hit the right “audio” button on the TV.

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