‘Flight of the Butterflies’ traces fragile lives, epic migration of monarchs
Posted April 11, 2013 4:34 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
TORONTO – If the title of the 3D nature film “Flight of the Butterflies” sounds a bit reminiscent of the Oscar-winning documentary “March of the Penguins,” that’s partly by design.
Just as that frozen tale offered a remarkably intimate look at the life (and loves) of a flock of Emperor penguins, this year-long chronicle of a monarch butterfly and her descendants is meant to tug at heart strings while raising awareness about their struggle to survive amid increasingly harsh conditions.
“It’s a long march for the penguins and it’s a long flight for the butterflies,” says co-executive producer and co-writer Wendy MacKeigan, who revels in recent rave reviews that compare her film to “March of the Penguins.”
“We wanted to have people look at the monarch butterfly never again in the same way. That was certainly one of our goals — to bring (audiences) right into their world and to take the point of view of the monarch butterfly in several sequences.”
The eye-popping “Flight of the Butterflies” zeroes in on the plight of one tiny winged creature dubbed Dana (in honour of her species’ scientific name, Danaus Plexippus) and her offspring as they migrate north through the United States to Canada.
Weighing less than a penny, one of Dana’s descendants then embarks on a remarkable migration all the way south to Mexico where she winters atop a 3,000-metre mountain with millions of other monarchs.
“They navigate and orient themselves in the most remarkable way,” says MacKeigan, who travelled to the world heritage site in 2010 and 2011 to capture footage.
“They have sequenced the monarch butterfly’s genome and every single part of its body has a multi role — the antennae do several things, the hairs on their neck, their feet, they taste with their feet, they navigate with the antennae, they are highly evolved creatures that make them masters of migration.”
The sight of their black-and-orange wings clustered together as they cloak tree trunks and branches is one of the most spectacular you can imagine, says veteran actor Gordon Pinsent, who appears in the film as Dr. Fred Urquhart — a real-life Ontario scientist who discovered the awe-inspiring nesting grounds.
“You come right out of yourself and you’re into the world of incredible monarch butterflies. It was just magical,” says Pinsent, who found himself surrounded by millions of fluttering creatures that hovered over his nose and ears and blanketed the ground underfoot.
“You will never see anything like this amazing spectacle that you see up in these mountains. It changes people.”
“Flight of the Butterflies” follows two threads. One recounts Urquhart’s nearly 40-year hunt to track down the monarchs’ secret hideaway. The second takes a close-up look at Dana’s evolution and that of her offspring, detailing the life cycle of a monarch from an egg to a caterpillar to a chrysalis to an adult butterfly.
Urquhart spent decades tracing the creature’s year-long annual migration cycle, enlisting a team of “citizen scientists” to tag their wings with adhesive labels so he could track their flight paths. It became clear that a group of North American monarchs would head south for the winter but where they ended up was a mystery.
The hunt eventually leads Urquhart and his wife Norah to a startling sight in Mexico, where they find millions of monarchs settle into semi-dormancy in the cool mountain air.
MacKeigan says it’s this dramatic arc that sets “Flight of the Butterflies” apart from other nature documentaries.
“We are not just telling an amazing natural history story, we are telling an amazing human discovery story, a detective story,” says MacKeigan.
“When people go to these films they’re not used to being so moved, so uplifted in an emotional way. Beyond of course seeing hundreds of millions of butterflies… it’s a moment of triumph (of discovery) that audiences are really responding to. Many scientists have said they’ve shed a tear.”
The $12-million Canada/Mexico/United Kingdom co-production heads to the Ontario Science Centre on Friday where it will be seen on an IMAX screen. It heads to Sudbury and Calgary in June before playing elsewhere.
The film already shows in about 50 venues — mostly giant-screened museum theatres in the United States and Canada. Other international markets include Mexico, Kuwait, Singapore, Switzerland and Australia.
But MacKeigan says she hopes the film’s strong tale pushes it into commercial theatres as well, noting it has snagged broader cinema screenings in cities including Mexico City and Edmonton.
Just getting the film made was a huge endeavour, she adds.
“The equipment weighs many tons. Getting it up a 10,000-foot mountain is not easy, getting the actors up there is not easy, the logistics were quite mind-boggling but we had a great crew. When you’re natural history filmmakers you learn to be patient,” she says.
“The animals don’t always do exactly what you want but this time it was spectacular. There were so many butterflies — if anything there were too many butterflies. They were everywhere and of course we had to take great care.”
Still, numbers have declined sharply since Urquhart made his discovery in 1976. Back then, it was believed that as many as one billion butterflies settled in the sanctuary. That plunged by about half in 2012 and since last year, numbers dropped sharply to 59 per cent of that number, says MacKeigan.
She says it’s not clear what caused the most recent decline but notes that monarchs depend on milkweed and that milkweed habitats are disappearing. Portions of the film’s box office will go towards conservation.
“It’s a threatened migration and it’s now considered, as of this year, a near-threatened species,” she says. “There’s lots we can do about that like planting milkweed, which is so easy to do.”
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Online: www.flightofthebutterflies.com