Shot over 2,000 days in more than 200 locations spanning every continent, it marks an unprecedented achievement in nature movies, said its British producer-director, Alastair Fothergill, whose credits include acclaimed marine documentary series The Blue Planet.

"Nobody has spent so much time, ever, making a wildlife film," he said, adding that he has long felt confined by the medium of TV as a nature documentarian.

"Cinema is the place that does justice to the natural world."

Besides aerial and underwater photography, Earth features intimate glimpses of wildlife made possible by new technology that allow helicopter-mounted cameras to capture close-ups of animals from a greater distance than ever before.

Similarly, The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos, scheduled to open in France in December 2008, will take viewers to the remote shores of a Tanzanian lake where fewer humans have ventured than have set foot on the moon, the filmmakers said.

Other films in the Disneynature development slate include Chimpanzee and Big Cats, both set in Africa and co-directed by Fothergill; the undersea exploration Oceans, from French co-directors Jacques Perrin (The Winged Migration) and Jacques Cluzaud; and a time-lapse spectacle of flowering plants, Naked Beauty: A Love that Feeds the Earth.

Disney executives said the new label follows a progression in the company's history that began in 1942 with the release of its animated wildlife classic Bambi and continued with its True-Life Adventures documentary series from 1948-1960.

(China Daily 04/23/2008 page11)