Admittedly, though, it’s hard to get some audiences to really suspend their belief, to identify with fictional characters in the space of only two hours when their beautiful faces, their alternate lives as celebrities, and the audience’s own skepticism all conspire to remind us of the cinematic enterprise’s artificiality. For a few of us, it’s virtually impossible to forget that the seemingly imperiled character on screen is an actor, particularly when played by some big-name like Nicole Kidman or Russell Crowe who brings so much personal and cinematic baggage to each new role.

To create characters whose shoes most viewers will be able to step into might just require casting total unknowns. With human actors, though, one still must contend with the distinctive desires and experience of the character they play, distinguishing features which one may or may not be able to relate to.

No, it seems that if you really want an everyman, a figure with whom virtually every audience member will be able to identify, you need to hire . . . a penguin.

And I don’t mean no Disneyesque, talking birds with their own personalities and backstories. I refer to wild penguins living in the Antarctic, an anonymous colony of birds whose only concerns appear to mirror our own most fundamental needs and desires.

The March of the Penguins, as dramatically pieced together by director Luc Jacquet and narrator Morgan Freeman, is a simple tale about bonding and survival; little else enters the picture. We don’t even get the marking of territory or battling for mates that characterize many meditations on wildlife. These characters risk life and, umm, fin to seek out a partner and have a child in the most dangerous environment imaginable, an environment that eliminates more than a few of them during the course of four-month-long fasts and multiple, very long and slow treks on the ice—all of which take place in temperatures that drop further than 80 degrees below zero (cold even for a penguin).

And in that long, difficult journey towards companionship and family lies the tale’s exciting adventure. No character complications or facile plot devices necessary.