‘Life In Color’ And ‘Earth Moods’ Deliver Earth Day Sustenance For Lovers of Nature Documentaries

It’s officially spring, if your sinuses haven’t told you already, and today’s Earth Day. While this holiday hasn’t woven itself into our film-and-tv-watching quilt quite like Christmas and Halloween have, it’s getting there.

A sad causality of corporate mergers shows that the superlative Disneynature line, a bright spot on the April calendar for twelve years, is on hiatus, if not totally kaput. However, the deluge of streaming services, much like the cascading waterfalls of the Izagu River, offer us a boundless rush of natural splendor.

There’s the trove of NatGeo material on Disney+, and even better is the seldom discussed Smithsonian Channel bundled on Paramount+. (Smithsonian goes deep, like with their Aerial series of entire episodes devoted to a bird’s eye view of everywhere from Greece to Wales to Zambia to, um, Indiana, sure, why not?) Two new series, Life in Color with David Attenborough on Netflix, and Earth Moods on Disney+ are an interesting look at different ways to approach “the nature doc” in an age of abundance.

Sir David Attenborough, 95 years old in just a few weeks, is our television St. Francis. Few have done more to educate and inspire us about the natural world. (To put this is meme terms, it’s the virgin Jacques Cousteau, sticking just to water, versus the Chad David Attenborough, conquering the whole planet.) His massive A Perfect Planet, shown in the BBC in January and now on Discovery+, felt like a career-capping summation, with a conservationist plea and a record-making Instagram account. If A Perfect Planet was his Beethoven’s Ninth, this is more like a quick a cappella encore.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t awesome.

When I was a little kid, in the stone ages, our television had two big channel dials for VHF and UHF (yeah, I know this sounds like I’m making it up) then three little nobs, one for volume, one for tint (if you wanted to make Big Bird orange), and one called “color.” If you turned that knob all to the left, everything went black and white. But turn it all the way to the right and everything goes far out.

As if grooving on the Jefferson Airplane concert in my mind, I watched as much television as I could with the color amped as far as it could go: bright and bleeding all over the place. My parents did not approve (you’re going to ruin your eyes! and don’t sit so close!) But if Sir David were around he’d have my back. His new Netflix series Life In Colour slams the accelerator on highlighting the bold, rich colors found in nature and lingering on them for extended views.

Scarlet macaws, toucans (tewkins, he calls ’em), birds of paradise, peacocks, mandril baboons, poisonous dart frogs, Bengal tigers, Cuban painted snails, mantis shrimps (which are insane looking!), iridescent blue butterflies, and more all get chapters in dazzling high resolution.

But this show isn’t just about grooving-out with these remarkable creatures. The first of three episodes (about 45 minutes each) is called “Seeing in Color,” and is keen on reminding us that nature’s nifty hues are not solely for our amusement. Male birds of paradise contort themselves to present a near-electric wall of shimmering green for the purposes of mating. Fiddler crabs evade birds and find grub because their strange, matchstick-like eyes can polarize light. Cameras nimble enough to ride a drone up the Z-axis show us the female birds of paradise view, and brand new lenses show us a polarized (or ultraviolet) filter on the world.

Episode two is called “Hiding in Color,” which shows how some animals in wintery areas change their fur color to white in snowier months, and explain that Bengal tigers are orange because their primary prey, deer, can’t see orange, so it is perfect camouflage.

Episode three is a victory lap, showing off the neat tech used throughout the show. While it is cool to see David Attenborough flip an iPad back and forth to show us “what a butterfly sees” versus our reality, it’s a little strange that an entire third of the series is basically a repeat of what we just saw, but reminding us just how impressed we ought to be.

This emphasis on over-explaining is the exact opposite of what Earth Moods has in mind. This series, on NatGeo via Disney+, is very upfront in its goals. It wants to be the classiest screensaver in town.

With no plot and no voice over — no learning! — Earth Moods is five 30-minute opportunities to sink into your couch and gawk at some splendor, man. It is produced and edited by Ryan Fouss, with images sourced by numerous camerapeople working from Australia, Namibia, Turks and Caicos, Utah and other spots. The music is composed by Neil Davidge from the British electronica band Massive Attack.

The first episode (“Frozen Calm”) and the fourth (“Desert Solitude”) are the most impressive, because these drone-shot vistas lend themselves to truly striking images. Time and again I’d point to the screen and mutter to my half-asleep wife that you could hit freeze-frame and put this in a gallery and call it abstract expressionist art. Yes, in context, I know that I am seeing a half-submerged glacier, but from this angle it looks like some of Gerhard Richter’s painted smears.

Episode three, “Tropical Serenity,” is pretty cheesy. There are some cool shots of happy dolphins and nice palm trees, but quite frankly what’s captured here is less impressive than the many 1080p YouTube videos from a beach in Costa Rica. (Check out the app Nature Relaxation on Demand, too.) The underwater footage is weirdly cheap-looking, especially compared to Sir David Attenborough’s coral reef sections in Life in Color.

Worst, though, is episode two, “Night Lights,” which is urban footage set to some really limp tunes. My gateway to the galaxy of streaming is an Apple TV, and it regularly defaults to nighttime footage of Dubai or Hong Kong. The shots here (a lot of which are downtown Los Angeles, not really the most dynamic skyline in the United States, no offense!) simply do not pop. Hitting pause on this Disney+ show and letting your Apple TV screensaver take over will be a vast improvement.

The final episode, much like Attenborough’s third, is also a victory lap. It is called “Peaceful Patterns,” and I think the idea was to try and highlight natural patterns in the Arizona rock formations or the tundra. “These are more like textures than patterns!” My wife murmured, not angry, but just disappointed. It ultimately feels like they had material for four episodes, but were told they needed to deliver a fifth.

Earth Moods isn’t a dud, but it’s far from a triumph. And Life in Color‘s yappity-yap does get you down after a while. But I remain optimistic. Even with the pandemic loosening up, I believe that nature show audiences, like Bengal tigers gobbling up colorblind deer, will always be on the hunt for new sustenance. I’m looking forward to see what’s on the menu for next year.

Jordan Hoffman is a writer and critic in New York City. His work also appears in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and the Times of Israel. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and tweets about Phish and Star Trek at @JHoffman.

Watch Life In Color on Netflix

Watch Earth Moods on Disney+