Adam Ravetch hadn't given much thought to walruses. Not until an Inuit warned him one of these blubbery mammals could "grab hold of you and suck your brains out." It was 1992. Ravetch, an underwater photographer from Los Angeles, and his new bride, Toronto writer Sarah Robertson, had come to the Arctic to film whales. He was diving in the frigid waters of Admiralty Inlet, northeast of Baffin Island, when the Inuit urged him to get out of the water if he didn't want to become walrus prey. Walruses usually dine on clams, sucking thousands from their shells in a single feeding. But Ravetch was in deep water, with no clam beds, and the walruses in that neighbourhood preyed on seals, he says. "They hold them, knock their heads off, and suck the flesh right out of their bodies. The Inuit told me, 'This could happen to you.' That was the first monster story we heard when we went north. And that's what switched our attention from whales."

This couple, now based in Victoria, has since spent much of the past 15 years filming walruses and polar bears in the Far North. And they've whittled 800 hours of footage into a movie called Arctic Tale. But don't expect to see any seal-sucking gore or polar bear brutality. Ravetch, 45, and Robertson, 41, who co-directed the film, were aiming for an Arctic answer to March of the Penguins. With backing from National Geographic, which produced Penguins, and Hollywood's Paramount Classics, which distributed An Inconvenient Truth, they have concocted a $10-million piece of family entertainment. Arctic Tale is a cozy coming-of-age story that follows a polar bear cub, Nanu, and a walrus pup, Seela, from birth to adulthood in a "kingdom of ice" that's melting at a perilous rate -- a global(heart)warming fable.

Like March of the Penguins, the story is driven home by an African-American storyteller, in this case Queen Latifah rather than Morgan Freeman. But it nudges Penguins' formula into fictional waters.

Every scene in Arctic Tale is composed of documentary footage. So a naive viewer, or even a jaded film critic, might be forgiven for believing that the movie's main characters, Nanu and Seela, actually exist -- that the filmmakers somehow tracked these same two animals over the years. That's what the film suggests. But when asked how they did that, Ravetch responds with the impatient air of a magician forced to explain, once again, how the rabbit got into the hat.

"These are composite characters," he says, during an interview with Robertson on a Toronto patio in the severely unpolar heat of a summer afternoon. "We're being very open about that." The characters, his wife elaborated, "are narrative constructs inspired by everything we've seen and learned."

So is the movie documentary or fiction?

"It's a hybrid," she says. "We're calling it a wildlife adventure."

"We're blurring the lines," adds Ravetch. "We're obviously trying to reach a large audience and be emotional. We're not afraid of having the animals feel."

By taking a poetic licence that would make Michael Moore blush, the filmmakers realize they are breaking a documentary taboo. "In a documentary construct," Ravetch acknowledges, "you do not anthropomorphize. But we're not worried about that, because the feelings and images -- we didn't make them up like in an animated film. That's exactly what we documented. These are the very best qualities of polar bears and walruses that we've seen." Picking up where March of the Penguins left off, he adds, "We wanted to push that genre further with a two-character story backed by real observations and backed by science when we could."

Between Latifah's narration, which invests a polar bear family with the fuzzy sentiments of Leave It to Beaver, and a soundtrack that choreographs walrus camaraderie to hits like We Are Family, the film certainly appears to ascribe cute human traits to animal behaviour. "But there's not as much anthropomorphism in this movie as people think," says Ravetch. Pointing to the tight-knit family bonds in walrus herds, Ravetch cites a scene in which a walrus dubbed Auntie risks her life to save a young calf from a polar bear. "People are surprised that walruses have families and nannies, and have this incredible devotion. The fabulous qualities of these animals remind us of ourselves. But we're so disconnected from the natural world, that idea seems preposterous to us."

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