At the precise moment you’re reading these words, billions of animals across the planet are on the move, migrating by land, sea and sky to their intended destinations. Animal migrations are vital survival strategies to feed, reproduce and find shelter, and their ability to do so is integral to the health and posterity of the planet at large. Unfortunately, with the looming dangers of climate change, their journeys are riskier than ever before. This challenge to the thousands-year-old legacy of transit is explored in Our Planet II, the stunning new docuseries that captures some of the most dramatic, compelling odysseys in the natural world.
Created by the Emmy Award–winning team behind Planet Earth and Our Planet and narrated by every nature lover’s No. 1 buttery-voiced Brit, David Attenborough, the announcement of Our Planet II is part of Netflix UK’s week of “Returning Favourites.” To date, Our Planet has more than 570 million hours viewed, and the new iteration of the series showcases the mind-blowing ways animals navigate our planet, from an abandoned Laysan albatross chick determining the best way to leave his island of origin to a herd of pronghorn antelope attempting to sojourn the wild west of southern Wyoming to the Rocky Mountains. It also follows the billions of minuscule red crabs attempting to cross from beaches to the forest where they’ll be safe — without getting eaten in the process, of course. The series features footage from migrations taking place all over the planet, spanning from Africa, India, China, the Arctic and more.
According to filmmakers Keith Scholey and Huw Cordey, the process of making the series begins by working with the scientists who are out in the field, actually studying the animals that are eventually filmed, often over the course of years.
“You always want to find new stories,” Scholey tells Tudum, “And it’s usually the scientists who find them. They’re very, very acute observers of things.”
Scholey says that once the filmmaking team gets insight from those scientists on what to actually film, they gather as much footage and information as they can, keeping their team of scientists in the loop every step of the way. What results is a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship: The film crew gets to tell amazing stories, and the scientists are able to pore through incredible footage on the creatures they’re studying.
“It’s a partnership,” Scholey says. “If you just use their life’s work, go in and shoot the stuff and take their story and walk away, that’s very disheartening. We make it as much of a partnership as possible. On so many shoots, the footage becomes really, really valuable to all of us.”
The scenes in Our Planet II are so visually stunning, it’s sometimes hard to wrap your head around the fact that it’s real. Many have wondered if Our Planet uses CGI to create or enhance the series’ many extraordinary moments.
“We’re always in disbelief that anyone could think it’s CGI, because with a natural history film like this, [CGI] would destroy the whole reason for showing it,” says Scholey. “It would become a piece of fiction, and no longer real. It’s something that would never even cross our minds to think about doing.”
The series is narrated by an icon of the natural world: Sir David Attenborough. He also narrated the first season of the series.
“He’s a really good actor,” Cordey says, “And he’s got that the power and the emotion in his voice to really carry those stories through in ways that very few or probably no other natural history narrator can do.”
Our Planet II premieres June 14 on Netflix.
