‘Life of Plants’ Turns Over New Leaf for Nature Films

The nature film needs reinventing again.

Years ago, its state of the art was “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” which set some kind of record for tranquilizing and tagging animals in the wild. Although this relentless labeling was passed off as a tool of animal research, one suspected its primary purpose was to provide action for the camera to shoot.

No animals got eaten on “Wild Kingdom,” but anything that moved, from beetles to rhinos, got darted and tagged by creaky host Marlin Perkins and his guys. Credit “Wild Kingdom” with pioneering nature programming that generated interest in animals and the wild.

If only for diversity, though, it was a relief when nature films later veered sharply toward realism, even though the carnivorous gore found in the natural order of things did not make for light viewing. Better that, though, than trivializing nature by winking at its violence or by giving animals human traits a la Disney.

Yet enough is enough, already. How much more can we take of animals killing and devouring other animals? Of lions, cheetahs, hyenas and wild dogs on the chase? Of gazelles, wildebeests, zebras and buffalo being disemboweled? Of boas crushing prey and swallowing it whole?

It happens--predators do it for survival--but who wants to see it again and again and again on networks from PBS to the Discovery Channel?

Apparently the bloodthirsty do, based on reported hot sales for “Trials of Life,” the Time-Life home-video series whose ads are all over TV, featuring graphic footage of predation with a voice-over saying: “See why we call them animals!”

Just who is more animalistic--the predators in the wild or the predators pushing the videos--is too close to call.

Yet even when predation isn’t the focus, nature programs tend to have a sameness about them, however glossy or proficiently done, partly because so many are from the same source (either the BBC or National Geographic), partly because the genre is in a rut. It needs to sink its claws into more creativity.

If we are going to travel the mainstream, though, give thanks, at least, for filmmakers Richard and Carol Farneti Foster, whose highly compelling “Jaguar: Year of the Cat” on Sunday opened the 14th season of the PBS “Nature” series. The Fosters spent a year trailing a pair of mated jaguars with their 35mm camera in the rain forest of Belize. The payoff, presented on TV in a letter-box format, at times was spectacular, as much for the film’s absorption of the jaguars’ total environment as for its intimate yet unintrusive glimpse of the powerful cats themselves.

And give thanks especially for “The Private Life of Plants,” a six-hour TBS documentary from the BBC that cuts a dazzling greenbelt through prime time this week, grazing on life forms from giant oaks to minuscule larvae and other things in nature that we take for granted. Finally, a plant series that’s a real turn-on.

The pictures alone are breathtaking, from colonies of blooms with radiant petals to the opening of Rafflesia, the biggest single flower in the world. Titled “Branching Out,” Hour 1 is largely the story of seeds--acacia seeds rising from elephant dung as green plants, seeds transported on the feet of ostriches, seeds traveling by sea and by air.

Cottonwood seeds swirl. Sycamore seeds spin above like tiny helicopters. Those little white puffs floating over water are also seeds. Plants scorched by fire release their seeds into the air. A squirting cucumber puts on a show, displaying its jet propulsion.

It’s advanced time-lapse footage, though, that transforms what might have been a dry, static subject into a nature drama whose characters just happen to be plants. Days, months and even years are converted into seconds by the latest version of this technology. Blooming flowers are time-lapsed into a spring ballet. Advancing as much as three inches a day, a traveling plant’s journey is followed by time-lapse equipment mounted on a rail.

It’s simply incredible stuff, as is a section of Hour 2 (“Putting Down Roots”) that creates a historical pageant from the rings inside an ancient tree that we’re told “was in the full vigor of its youth when the pharaohs were ruling Egypt.”

Meanwhile, sea beans voyage down a river past submerged hippos, making their way to the sea, where they will ride ocean currents for as much as a year.

“The Private Life of Plants” has its own traveling bean in narrator Richard Attenborough, so long associated with the BBC’s Natural History unit and the voice of so many of its films that he, too, may have been in the full vigor of his youth at the time of the pharaohs.

Attenborough is a little grating the way he hogs the camera more than most nature hosts, from greeting us as a tiny blip somewhere in a broad carpet of snow to extending his hand to catch a plant that a stiff wind has pushed across desert sands. But give him good scripts--and these are superb, in contrast to some of the overcooked verbiage you get with some nature films--and he takes off. When he describes a plant’s “fur of tiny hairs” in his familiar breathless style, it sounds almost X-rated.

And if you absolutely must have a violence fix, “The Private Life of Plants” won’t disappoint you there, either. In Hour 2, an ant falls prey to a carnivorous trumpet plant and a beetle walks on a leaf that closes on the insect and consumes it. “There’s no escape,” says Attenborough, ominously.

It’s why we call them plants!

* “The Life of Plants” airs in two three-hour installments, today and Tuesday at 5:05 p.m. on TBS.