March of the Lesbian WalrusesArctic Tale sounds off on climate change, among other things.

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Could the blatant messaging of Arctic Tale be an act of atonement for a movie that ignored global warming—and whose message could so easily be co-opted? There's little chance the new film will be hijacked by the Christian right. Compared to March of the Penguins, it reads like a godless, left-wing fantasy, or an episode of "Postcards From Buster." It isn't hard to see a social agenda in the hardship story of Nanu the polar bear and her single mom. (When Dad shows up, he's an abusive thug who hoards his food and tries to kill them.) Meanwhile, Seela the walrus shares a family unit with her doting mother and an ambiguous female partner known as "Auntie." (The boy walruses turn up only to donate sperm and slip back into the sea.) And who narrates this romp through the great gay north? Instead of Morgan Freeman, we get the barely closeted Queen Latifah.

The directors of Arctic Tale, Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson, told me they were glad they could ditch the eco-agnosticism of March of the Penguins and replace it with a strong, clear message about global warming. As for the herds of same-sex parents, they might protest that I'm reading my own ideas into their film, just as the devout did to Penguins. Their script came from nature, they assured me, and tries to be "pure and honest." But the directors are also quick to admit that their movie is not a documentary.

First of all, the characters of Nanu and Seela aren't real—they're composites patched together from footage of many different animals, shot over the course of 15 years. Trick photography provides impossible shots of the world from the animals' point of view. And half of the grunts and growls you hear in the movie were recorded after the fact, at a zoo. "We call it more of a wildlife adventure," say Ravetch and Robertson. (The New York Times prefers "a fictional, family-friendly coming-of-age tale"; the Associated Press calls it "a bit of a cheat.")

The same could be said of March of the Penguins, which also fudged the facts to make better characters and a more accessible story line. Artful editing and piped-in sound effects turned what could have been a straightforward nature film into an anthropomorphic adventure story. "This film is not a documentary," Jacquet told the BBC in 2005, a few months before it won an Oscar for best documentary.

Perhaps "The Passion of the Penguins" should have served as a parable on the dangers of the pathetic fallacy. Arctic Tale loses credibility when it tries to put a human face on the animal face of global warming. While the story of Nanu and Seela may get kids talking about carbon emissions, it won't make them any smarter about polar bears and walruses. (Eventually—in a hundred years, perhaps—these animals will be in grave danger. For the time being, we don't know if rising temperatures are hurting or helping them.) And progressive family values look just as silly as conservative ones when they're projected onto another species. For all its good intentions, the new movie from National Geographic doesn't atone for the sins of 2005. It commits them all over again.

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Daniel Engber is a senior editor at Slate. He can be reached at .

Still from Arctic Tale by Arctic Bear Productions.

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