When the chicks are a little bigger they move to a more traditional part of the lake and there we get evil spotted hyenas picking off the weak and elderly birds! The flamingos are stunning and the team does a great job showing the scope of the thousands of birds and then time with one or two although they are not given names like Maya in Monkey Kingdom nor do we see a real social structure like MK has. The film shows them trying to get up and then falling and I was seriously upset! A side of me wanted to yell at the filmmakers and tell them to help the bird and get that salt off but I guess that isn’t their job. Some are so weighed down when the group leaves the lake they can’t keep up and are left. If this doesn’t tug at your heartstrings than we need to talk… They show the little chicks who aren’t strong enough get ‘shackles of salt’ around their little legs and they try to walk away from the marabou but the salt weighs them down. You probably think I’m joking but I was upset for the little chicks. They were so creepy and stood around the pack waiting for the little birds to get separated and pounce! There are the villainous marabou who I sincerely hated so much. You can see in the photo above the piles of salt they nest on and they move around and chirp like adorable little birds they are.īut wait there is evil about! (literally in the movie the predator is referred to as the Wicked Witch of the lake). Where it does work is the sections involving the little baby chicks that are sooo cute! The narration read by Mariella Frostrup (who sounded to me like Cate Blanchett) tries to give a haunting quality and tell a mystery and sometimes it works and other times it feels very cheesy like we are touring Middle Earth instead of Tanzania. I mean look at this crazy weird lake in the photo below. I’ve never heard of these lakes and they were so different than any other natural phenom I’ve ever seen. It was really fun to learn about a place that was completely foreign to me. The sun is so hot that large sections of the lake dry up and there remains red salt beds that the flamingos use to nest. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a place that changes so rapidly. This feels like a man standing in the water with a camera watching things happen. They also don’t resort too time lapse as a gimmick like they did in Earth. I can’t imagine how many hours in a boat or sitting out on blazing hot salt flats they must have done to get some of their shots. It’s so different and beautiful and the cinematography throughout is stunning. The water looks red with the algae and that is what makes the flamingos pink. It starts out with drinking in the red algae. The movie approaches their entire existence as a ‘mystery’ and lays out the pieces of how they are able to survive. These lakes have bizarre properties which happen to be just right for flamingos. Unlike Earth which split its time between 3 animal families Crimson looks at a species of flamingos that inhabit a series of lakes in Tanzania. Yep, this movie really got to me more than either of the Disneynature films I have seen (Monkey Kingdom and Earth). Last night I watched the 2nd Disneynature film (my 3rd review) called The Crimson Wing and found myself getting emotional over the plights of flamingos.
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