For animal lovers, watching the barrage of animal-centric movies that come out every year can feel like playing a game of Russian roulette with your emotions. Lovers of the site Does the Dog Die? know that filmmakers enjoy working with trained animals but don’t always love making sure they make it to the end of the film unscathed. This feels like an even worse problem for the likes of movies like A Dog’s Purpose, Marley & Me or even old classics like Old Yeller and Where the Red Fern Grows where the animals often feel like they only exist as blank screens for the human characters to project their dumb human feelings onto.
Brazilian filmmaker David Schurmann doesn’t exactly go in a different direction with his new, family-forward film, My Penguin Friend, but he also doesn’t shy away from turning a loving eye on the titular bird that stars alongside Jean Reno. The movie doesn’t make any bones about why Brazilian fisherman João Pereira de Souza takes such a shine to the oil-covered penguin he finds on the beach—before we ever see a single beak or wing, we watch his son drown and João bury himself in decades of grief paralysis. Slowly, while befriending his new penguin friend, he opens back up to his friends and community. My Penguin Friend never fully encourages João to heal from the trauma he’s lived with for so long, but his experience with Dindim is powerful enough that he pushes against that pain in ways that may seem small but feel monumental once you’ve gotten to know him.
What makes My Penguin Friend feel different from other animal-centric films is that João never treats Dindim like a pet—only as a friend. It’s a constant refrain: Dindim is there because he wants to be there. João is clear to correct everyone from local children to the interviewer who comes to do a segment on their friendship that the bird “comes and goes as he pleases” and that there is no ownership at play. We don’t even stick with João the entire time—we get Dindim’s perspective just as often, following him as he traverses the 5,000 miles between Brazil and his Patagonian home where he’s fawned over—and nearly taken captive by—a team of scientists studying the habits of the Magellanic penguin. The moments where we lose focus on the humans and follow Dindim, instead, are easily the best of the film. The camerawork adds so much personality to Dindim with its ground-height handheld shots of our penguin friend, even as he wanders around town, popping bike tires and upsetting the local chickens. They take this a step further, occasionally giving us shots, shown through a vividly colored fisheye, of the world through Dindim’s eyes. It’s clever, and seeing the world at this level does a lot to frame Dindim as a legitimate protagonist rather than a vehicle for João’s grief.
My Penguin Friend is the type of movie that reminds us, as critics, that not every movie needs to be flawless to feel just right. Does this movie have some issues? Absolutely—the pacing is strange, the dialogue is sometimes just a little bit unnatural and when the film ends, it goes out without almost any fanfare or high note. The movie, in this way, is a little like Dindim, choosing for himself when it’s time to hit the waves again. It also struggles to adequately convey the stakes of anything Dindim goes through—outside of one scene where he climbs down a small cliff and hurts himself in the process. Even from the beginning, My Penguin Friend isn’t interested in killing the bird, which means that the journey he takes during the film’s climax seems more like an excuse to watch a cute penguin waddle around doing his own Homeward Bound.
The complaints to be had feel irrelevant; this wasn’t designed to be a world-rocking slab of cinema; it was meant to be a movie that’ll make kids and adults alike cheer for the triumphs of a penguin and his grieving Brazilian fisherman friend. Surprisingly, the one place it feels destined to make waves is in how overt it is about casually spreading awareness of the damage people are doing to this planet—fish are filled with microplastics, and nests are adorned with scavenged bottlecaps and other detritus pulled from the beach. Hell, even Dindim’s presence in João’s life is because he was covered in spilled oil and needed to be tended to. The movie doesn’t go out of its way to shout from the rooftops that we need to do something fast, but it also feels like the movie would be too disingenuous if it didn’t at least nod to the fact that these beautiful birds are being terribly affected by humankind’s lack of interest in viable solutions to our global garbage issues.
While My Penguin Friend is only loosely based on the story of a real-life penguin who befriended a real-life fisherman, the reality is somehow sweeter than we see: as the onscreen crawl at the end tells us, Dindim visited João for eight consecutive years, coming back like clockwork. The film is deliberate in how much respect it pays to the penguin (who, it should be noted, was played by 10 penguins, an animatronic penguin and a splash of CGI) that it even feels like the story was only told because it has a happy ending for everybody. Be warned, though: just because the film leaves us on a high note doesn’t mean you won’t spend half of the movie ugly crying over flappy wings and affectionate bird gifts.
Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions
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