Turtle: The Incredible Journey Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

Turtle: The Incredible Journey Blu-ray Movie Review

A Turtle's Tale With REAL Turtles

Reviewed by Michael Reuben March 25, 2012

In an accident of timing, Jeffrey Kauffman's review of the Belgian animated feature A Turtle's Tale: Sammy's Adventures appeared as I began to write about this semi-documentary feature from Seaworld Pictures, which tells much the same story with real turtles. I call it a "semi-documentary", because director Nick Stringer, a veteran of productions for National Geographic and the producer of Meerkat Madness for TV, chose to follow the template used so successfully by the award- winning March of the Penguins by melding documentary footage with traditional techniques of narrative cinema. He used compelling narration (by actress Miranda Richardson), emotional scoring, suspenseful editing and, in appropriate instances, CG-assisted recreation to fill in the sea turtle's 21-year-long sojourn in the ocean before it returns to the sands of its birth.

Though Stringer had the assistance of marine biologists as technical advisers and the blessing of Seaworld, a few viewers have carped that the resulting film violates standards of objectivity, and yet no one has identified any inaccuracies in Stringer's account of the sea turtle's life cycle. It's as accurate as the state of current knowledge allows. As the extras indicate, scientists are still investigating the mysteries of the sea turtle's travels in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean during the many years after its emergence from a tiny egg buried in the Florida sands. Stringer's achievement is that he turned the account into a compelling adventure tale that can hold the attention of a general audience (hence, the G rating), even though the characters don't speak and haven't been anthropomorphized (which is a fancy way of saying that they don't act like people, as they do in cartoons). Certain shortcuts were necessary, such as having different turtles play the heroine at various stages of her life, since Stringer didn't have the luxury of waiting almost a quarter century for his star to grow up. He did, however, have Seaworld's turtle rescue and rehabilitation program, which served as the turtle equivalent of "central casting".

Like the sea turtle's life, the film opens with a scene of highly charged drama, as the newly hatched baby loggerhead turtles dig their way up to the beach surface and crawl on tiny flippers toward the ocean. Roughly half of them make it; the rest fall victim to exhaustion and predators, primarily crabs and seagulls. As actress Richardson notes in a separate interview, she knew about this aspect of the sea turtle's life before working on the film, because it has been immortalized in a famous passage by Tennessee Williams (in Suddenly Last Summer), who used the spectacle of helpless hatchlings being picked off as an example of nature's primal cruelty.

Stringer has captured remarkable footage of the event, but he has avoided showing anything gruesome or bloody. Instead, through careful editing and suspenseful music—in other words, through traditional filmmaking techniques—he gives you the sense of creatures fleeing for their lives, and only some of them making it.

The film stays with one turtle in particular, a female who is simply called "she". She eventually attaches herself to a "raft" made of clumped seaweed and inhabited by a variety of marine life that makes an interesting cast of characters in the first portion of the film. Most such "rafts" will be drawn by currents into the Gulf of Mexico, but the script by writer Melanie Finn has this particular one get diverted into the Sargasso Sea. With no wind or currents, the "raft" drifts for a time, allowing the camera an opportunity to explore the inhabitants and surroundings and the narration to contrast sailing ships, which entered the Sargasso Sea at their peril, with modern craft, which can power through it. (As disclosed in the credits, many of these scenes were shot in tanks, because of the practical difficulties of obtaining the appropriate footage in the open sea.)

Eventually, though, our heroine must move on. Her "raft" drifts into the path of a cargo vessel and is broken apart. Now she has to find her own way, but sea turtles have an in-born navigational system that appears to be based on a genetically inherited map of the earth. As she traverses the ocean, the turtle grows larger and gains strength, all the while learning useful things like what she can and can't eat (man-of-war and jellyfish tentacles are nutritious; shiny plastic bags and other garbage from shore look pretty but are potentially lethal) and how to deal with sharks (once her shell hardens, she can pretty much ignore them).

Eventually, 21 years older and a lot bigger, her biological clock will lead her to an ancestral spawning ground and then back to the beach where she originally hatched. That beach may no longer look the same—21 years is a long time in a place like Florida, where construction is always booming (or, at least, it used to be)—but she'll know it just the same. And just as it's happened since dinosaurs walked the earth, she'll lay her eggs on that same beach and return to the sea, beginning the cycle anew.

Turtle: The Incredible Journey Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The hi-def camerawork for Turtle: The Incredible Journey is by accomplished Australian underwater cinematographer Rory McGuinness, and it shines on Hannover's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray. As befits a film for family audiences, the image is bright and gently colorful, although the colors don't enjoy the wide variations that animators might bring to the subject. Since this is the ocean, blues and greens dominate, with infrequent grays for larger marine life such as whales. Every so often, a man-made object appears, and we get entirely uncharacteristic hues; for example, there's the brief sequence with a cargo ship, whose darker and more intense colors emphasize the sense of danger from this imposing and unfamiliar presence. Detail is generally excellent, especially in close-ups of the varied marine life. The image is free of video noise, but without any indication that noise reduction has been inappropriately applied, and there are no signs of artificial sharpening. The 80-minute program fits comfortably on a BD-25 without compression artifacts, although I did notice minor banding on dissolves. If you're not particularly sensitive to this phenomenon, it might escape your attention altogether.

It's worth noting that a 3D version of this film exists and has been shown in some theatrical venues. However, Hannover has not yet ventured into 3D Blu-ray releases.

Turtle: The Incredible Journey Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The PCM 2.0 track is solid and serviceable. Miranda Richardson's voice remains centered and slightly detached from the image, which is where a narrator's voice belongs. The orchestral score is by Henning Lohner, who was formerly an apprentice to Hans Zimmer and worked with him on such films as Gladiator and The Thin Red Line. The influence is obvious in the score's sweep and dramatic ambition, all of which are served well by the lossless track's reproduction. Some scenes have audible sound effects of water and sand, but this is done inconsistently, and it's not always obvious whether the effects are true production sound or the results of post-production foley.

Turtle: The Incredible Journey Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interview with Director Nick Stringer and Narrator Miranda Richardson (HD, 1080i; 1.78:1; 4:31): The director and narrator have been interviewed separately, and the clips have been intercut. Stringer discusses technical issues in making the film, whereas Richardson focuses on dramatic and emotional elements. Unfortunately the clip is too short to cover the full extent of the subject. The feature cries out for a director commentary.


• Sea Turtle Release (HD, 1080i; 1.78:1; 7:51): A featurette showing the release of a sea turtle named "Maude", who has been outfitted with a tracking device, a part of the Seaworld Rescue and Rehabilitation Program. Miranda Richardson accompanies the Seaworld personnel.


• Turtle Premiere (HD, 1080i; 1:78; 4:36): A kind of "red carpet" event for the premiere of the film at San Diego's Seaworld. No turtles attended, but Stringer and Richardson are interviewed, along with various actresses you may or may not recognize, including Lauren Sweester, who manages to work in a plug for her recent film Winter's Bone (a fine film, as it happens).


• Seaworld Promo (Seaworld: A Legacy of Rescue) (HD, 1080i; 1.78:1; 9:25): A PSA about Seaworld's animal rescue operations all over the world. It was produced recently enough to include discussion of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.


• Seaworld Ad (HD, 1080i; 1.78:1; 1:11): At startup the disc plays an ad for Seaworld and Busch Gardens. This can be skipped with the fast forward button and is not otherwise available once the disc loads.

Turtle: The Incredible Journey Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Before watching Turtle: The Incredible Journey, I read some of the customer feedback at Amazon and noticed complaints about the film's "green" and "conservation agenda". As I watched the film, I kept waiting for the speeches and diatribes, but they never appeared. What the film depicts are facts that are hard to deny (though these days, apparently, no fact is too well- established for someone not to try): Sea turtles do encounter man-made garbage and oil residue in the ocean, and some of them die from consuming these substances. Many sea turtles are hooked by fishing boats and die as a result, while others are set free (as in fact happens in the film). Certain fishing beds have been depleted by overfishing. The narration states these facts without offering any prescriptives, even though one of its sponsors is the Save Our Seas Foundation.

Indeed, if I were someone who scrutinized films for an "agenda", I'd be more inclined to see the opposite message in The Incredible Journey: an anti-green reassurance that nature finds a way. As the narration repeatedly notes, the sea turtle's retreating to the sea from the land allowed it to outlast the dinosaurs, when they ruled the planet. The Incredible Journey shows the turtle surviving against apparently insurmountable odds now that humanity rules the planet. If anything, the film could be taken as a demonstration of nature's remarkable ability to absorb human activity and maintain equilibrium.

If one is looking for an agenda. Whatever happened to just watching the film? When WALL•E was first released, there were those who complained about its "anti-corporate" and "anti-consumer" message. Most of us managed to enjoy it as a sweetly romantic comedy with breathtaking visuals. Some viewers seem to be unnerved by a film unless they can slap a familiar label on it (either "pro" or "con", but usually "con"). They should take a lesson from the sea turtle and just keep paddling forward. Highly recommended, especially for family viewing.