Arctic Tale is the culmination of a long, professional love affair with that region for the husband and wife team of Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson. The film tells the fictionalized story of two young Arctic animals: a polar bear cub named Nanu, and a walrus calf named Seela. In part, the film is an attempt to communicate something meaningful about the ways in which bears and walruses live; and in part, the film is an attempt to communicate that those ways of life are being endangered by the gradually receding polar ice cap.

Courtesy of a national publicist, Greg Wright spoke with Ravetch and Robertson about their upcoming film, due for a gradual theatrical release across the country starting July 25.

What was the genesis of this project? How did it come about that you got involved?

Sarah Robertson: Well, we’ve been involved in filming in the Arctic for over ten years, collecting footage on our own. And we’ve been working with National Geographic for a good bit of that time, for television. So when we all, together, decided that we wanted to share our journey and experiences in the Arctic and put that on the big screen, National Geographic was also interested in doing that. So we got together to figure out how to do that. And the film represents over ten years of our work.

So the footage that shows up onscreen in Arctic Tale is not just material that was shot explicitly for this project, but includes material that was shot long before the title Artic Tale was thought of. Is that right?

Adam Ravetch: Yes, that’s right. The one thing that we always wanted to do was to take people to the Arctic, to put them in that environment—and the small screen just wouldn’t quite do. We’ve always dreamt of putting it on the big screen. And those early years told us—by focusing on walruses and bears, seeing remarkable behavior in the wild—what way to go with the story. For example, we follow a walrus calf whose name is Seela, and a polar bear cub named Nanu, and they have incredible maternal investment—in both animals—where the mother takes care of the walrus calf for three years, and so does the polar bear. So we played upon that for the basis of these remarkably intelligent animals passing on knowledge and information to their young, so that they also have all the skills and information they need to become adults.

SR: You’ve probably figured this out already, but Seela and Nanu are composite characters. We didn’t, in the wild, follow the same animals for eight years—which would be impossible to do. So our characters are made up of several different animals that we encountered in the North. And for us, [those characters] really represent the best of their species—the “best” polar bear and walrus that we saw.

So they’re representative characters placed into a narrative structure.

SR: That’s right. Yes.

AR: But it’s also a real adventure. And what we mean by “real” is that these are behaviors that we observed in the wild. It’s not manipulated, not like an animated film. We didn’t say, “Hey, let’s put a mother and [an unrelated] calf together in this [invented] situation.” It’s all behavior that we actually observed over ten to fifteen years.

So, specifically, then, it probably wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the “auntie” walrus that ends up tangling with the adult male polar bear is not literally the shepherd of “Seela” for several years.

AR: No, no.

SR: Well, what we saw in the wild—and we were fascinated to find this—is that we always saw a third animal around the mother and calf. And it’s most likely—probably a 90% chance that it is—a relative of the mother, whether an aunt or a sister. And they do devote an enormous amount of care and time to calf-rearing, constantly helping the mother protect the calf. So everything that you see up on the screen is right on.

In terms of reflecting the reality of how the animals behave and interact with each other.

SR: Yes.

AR: But that was a remarkable behavior that we saw when I was on that island, and I filmed that male polar bear going in and grabbing that walrus calf. That in itself was a remarkable feat for the bear. But then that third animal coming back up to help save “Seela” really happened; and I think that’s the surprising thing that happens, sitting years and years in the field and never knowing exactly what you’re going to record.

Now I have to ask the question: do polar bears really fight full-grown walruses? Because they’re completely outsized by them.

SR: Male polar bears—and we’ve seen this several times—can either drown them, or they will just sit on them, until the walrus suffocates.

Really.

SR: Yeah.

Wow.

AR: And this is a little graphic, but what they go after—and this is what really makes the strategy of the polar bear so efficient, since they can’t bite through the blubber, though they might grab them by the nape of the neck—is the nostrils. If they can damage the nostrils, then, unfortunately, the walrus’s lungs will fill up with blood and it can’t hold its breath any longer. That’s pretty graphic—but then, and this has been documented, the bears will also just sit on a walrus, and they can take ’em.

That’s amazing. Now, in terms of the narrative, it looks like [co-writer] Linda Wolverton has got an extensive background in children’s films. Did Paramount Vantage bring her in on the project to help craft a children’s narrative for the story?

SR: No. Linda was actually one of the first writers on the movie from the very beginning. We brought it to her because she has a children’s background.

So she was your choice.

SR: Yes, she was all of our choice. She came in very early on, and she was great in helping us focus on point-of-view, how to tell the story through the eyes of a character—which is how we filmed it. So much of the film is in closeup. She’s an expert at telling [a story from] POV. One of the things I like about her writing is shown in the sequence where the mother bear lets Nanu go. And we switch from baby bear’s POV to mama bear’s POV—as far as what it might be like to have to cast off your young one. And she was wonderful with that.

And [co-writer] Mose Richards—I imagine you probably had contact with him from back in your Nature series days.

AR: We actually knew Mose as far back as 1992, or something like that, when we all worked at the Cousteau Society, when Jacques was still alive. Mose has a great understanding of the natural world and brought another sensibility to the table, to add to what Linda had already done.

I imagine that your background—being totally steeped in nature films—and Mose’s experience brings to Arctic Tale the sense that I got of the tradition of the classic Disney nature films. Is that right?

SR: Well, we went through so many scripts because, I think, we were trying to decide how much information to put in. So we expanded and then contracted, kind of like an accordion, our notion of how much information the movie should have—and how much room to just to sit, and sort of feel, the movie should have.

AR: We’re really calling this a new genre of film. We’re not calling it a documentary. It’s what we call a “wildlife adventure.”

Because it’s more of a creative fiction using documentary footage to construct the story.

AR: Right. Using real footage. So, as Sarah said, we had one version of the script that was too much information; so we tried to find the right balance of keeping the information sparse, of keeping the audience surprised. We didn’t want to tell them what they were seeing on the screen—and that was helped by having different writers with different sensibilities.

And at what point did Kristin Gore get involved in the project?

SR: Surprisingly—at least, this wasn’t known to me—Kristin does some comedy writing. And we wanted to lighten up some of the lines, have fun a little bit more, especially at the beginning of the movie. So we brought her in to be funny!

AR: The film has such a heavy message, we wanted to put everyone into less of a gloom-and-doom feeling.

Well, there you go. Now, one of the things I liked about the way the story was structured—and some people might object to this, or have a problem with it because this is ostensibly a “documentary,” even though you don’t view it that way—was the genericization of the locales. So the place where Nanu was born is referred to as “Snow Mountain,” and the island they all swim out to is called “Rock Island.”

SR: Right.

AR: Right.

So where are those locations? Is Rock Island— Where is that located, exactly, the island where that footage was filmed?

SR: It represents the hundreds and hundreds of islands that exist up in the Arctic archipelago.

I wouldn’t have guessed that based on the way the footage was put together, because the island sequence really seemed all of a piece.

AR: That island is an actual island in the Arctic. This film was shot in several different Arctic nations. A big chunk of it was shot in the Canadian Arctic. But there was the idea of doing “Snow Mountain” and “Rock Island” to get our audience to identify with a specific place. This is the place where the bear cubs are born; and this sheet of ice is where the baby seals are calved; and then, of course, Rock Island is the place where they all become refugees. It was to reduce confusion for the audience. If we started naming specific places, it might get them confused as to where we are in the story. And that was why we went with a generic name for each location.

I really appreciated that, because children really seem to go for generic references. So Curious George’s friend is “The Man in the Yellow Hat.” You don’t need a “name” for him. It’s the adults who seem to want names for everything, more and more details. They forget about the kids, and that details of that kind don’t really do anything for kids.

SR: Right.

So I’m presuming you didn’t want the film coming off like a geography lesson.

AR: No.

SR: We didn’t want to teach. We didn’t want to be in school.

AR: The DVD will have more about behind the scenes things, and I think in there we’ll have more about where we filmed.

The last question I have for you is kind of a philosophical question. You have talked about how you structured the narrative so that the audience would become attached to specific characters. Now, I think it’s going to be hard enough for adults to grasp—given the complexity with which images are stitched together to construct a film—that these are not specific individuals that we’re following, that they’re actually fictional composites. So how do you feel about the problem of children getting attached to what they believe are real animals—specific animals—because the story is presented in something of a documentary style? And then having to deal with the idea, after the fact, that no, these are not specific animals in the same way that a friend is a specific person?

SR: Children are attached to the animals whether you give them names or not. For many many months, we were just calling them “Bear” and “Walrus.” And you get the same effect. Exactly the same effect. You’re following these characters, and things happen to them. You get to know them and see them make decisions. I think anyone will care about these animals when they see, close up, what’s happening to them.

AR: We also tried to stay as “authentic” as we could with the names that we chose. “Nanu” is Inuktitut, where the word for “polar bear” is “nanuk”—which you might remember from the film Nanook of the North. And “Seela” is an Inuktitut word for “bright one” or “intelligent one.” So we tried to keep the names real, and not come up with things like “Davey” or “Rosie”—names that didn’t fit the place.

Yes.

AR: You know, we have kids. And having gone to films with them, we thought that it was important for them—and for adults—to connect emotionally with individual characters. And then, hopefully, that will prompt discussion in the car on the way home. We’re being very open about the idea that these are composite characters. But we felt it very important to go specific, rather than as in March of the Penguins, which was about penguins in general.

SR: Also, one of our objectives with the film was to celebrate the qualities of bear and walrus. And I think that kids and adults alike will see, and will be impressed, that walruses hug and cradle their babies—and that bears can find communal ways to live, and that aunties will put their lives on the line for babies. These are just celebrations of these amazing animals, and hopefully, that’s what’s coming out of the movie. And even to extend that thought, that even we, ourselves—using the animals as metaphors—should be bold like bears, and take initiative to find new ways to live.

Maybe we can even, in looking at our children’s response to the film, learn something about human children and the attachments that they form—and how they form them. And stop expecting children to behave and form attachments in the way that adults do.

AR: I think you’re right. I know that in our ten or fifteen years with these animals, we have seen so much of ourselves in them—and that’s what’s quite amazing and remarkable.