Hidden Kingdoms

I get what they are trying to do here, and it's a great concept..but using terrible CGI, and green screens to Super-impose animals in an environment, and to layer super-imposes animals with OTHER super imposed animals is just reaching to far. I liked the first episode, but by the 3rd, the terrible effects and over dramatization were so bad I couldn't take the show seriously.

WOW! just WOW! When I saw this documentary starting up on the television, i thought it would be just another Animal Planet style of depicting animals in the usual fashion, but boy was I wrong!!!

The visuals in this film are absolutely fascinating. Taking the perspective of a tiny mouse and other tiny creatures that we don't seem to care much about as opposed to large cats. Who would have thought the film maker could have captured such a suspenseful existence! The way the film is shot, takes you right beside these little fellas, and shows the courage that they much show each day, in such glorious fashion! Slow motion shots capture a much more entertaining style of Hollywood film and at the same time, maintain a level of education that you would find in any well planned out documentary. Stephen Fry does a great job in narrating the film in a very calm fashion. It doesn't need lively commentary, because the visuals take care of that!

As far as documentaries are concerned, this is essential viewing. I am so glad I checked it out when it came out on television here in Australia, and you can be assured that I will be tracking down the DVD!

This BBC nature doc series tries to look at the small world from ground level rather than human level. The camera is brought down to the ground and looking up at the bigger animals. A lot of pictures are composites of the small and the big. There is definitely a lot of post-production. It's fascinating to see how difficult it is to film the small and how much setup it requires. I assumed that they used miniature equipment to catch these small creatures. In reality, they're putting the regular cameras as close to the ground as possible. They're putting them in holes or elevating the ground. They're manufacturing a lot of these pictures. While I love the point of view, it does look like something scripted and created.

Non of that takes away from the natural wonder of these creatures. The most surprising is the howl of the mouse. It might not be a roar but it might as well be. It is the most fun, the most shocking, and the most wonderous of this series. It's amazing how nature can sometimes shock me with something so small. It's an interesting and new way to see these tiny creatures.

I found these series PURE art. Intertwined with the latest technology and awe-inspiring narrative, I felt succumbed into the world of these hidden kingdoms which, thanks to these brilliant minds behind these series, do not feel so remote to us humans, anymore. To be honest, I felt connected to the lives of these tiny creatures. It all seems so familiar. The struggle for survival, the daily challenges, the escape from predators, the chase for food, the planning for the future, the thirst for new experiences and independence. The only thing missing is love but that may well be another familiar feeling to us humans too.. I would watch them over and over again, the thrills, the visuals, the stories they all fill my imagination with joy.

Hidden Kingdoms is an embarrassing and misleading attempt to create the life world of small creatures like rats, marmosets or large beetles and show their day-to-day struggles for food, breeding and maintaining territory.

The shows team overproduce every shot with high-frame slow motion sequences that are often interjected into something resembling live action footage à la "the Matrix". Completely overcooked foley fills entire episodes with preposterous sound FX, and whats worst of all is the lame computerized compositing effects, employed to show slow motion 'glory shots' of small creatures leaping to and fro. This is the only nature doco series I know of that uses a freaking BLUE SCREEN and comps its subjects in front of fake exotic backgrounds. The show's clearly too cheap and quickly produced to get rid of the fuzzy outline and obvious colour grading mistakes every time they appear. The soundtrack all-too-frequently blares loud Broadway style gangster music or massive classical crescendos while showing something as commonplace as a beetle climbing out from under some rice grains.

To be honest about the quality of camera equipment, there are occasionally some great close-ups of the critters on show in this series, but often the choppy and confusing editing, the endless music video style transitions and sheer lack of establishing shots evince an annoying sense of falseness that permeates these overproduced, wide-angled "power documentaries" or whatever they're supposed to be.

Its unfortunate that Stephen Fry got involved in this project as narrator. He's not exactly desperate for a paycheck, BTW. Trash television at its worst.