In 2006, the French nature doc March of the Penguins won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. The film tracked the breeding habits of a flock of emperor penguins in the extremely harsh conditions of the Antarctic winter and was narrated by Morgan Freeman. Last summer, another nature movie, Arctic Tale was released, but it’s unlikely to ever become a household name like March of the Penguins.

When directors Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson came out with this family-friendly arctic nature film that tracked the lives of a walrus named “Seela” and a polar bear named “Nanu,” it had all the makings of a slam-dunk, but it never quite took off. That the subjects of the film are given names should be the first indication that this isn’t your typical nature documentary; it makes them seem like pets. The second tip-off is the poster, which shows some cartoony polar bears in the foreground that resemble the bears from those ubiquitous Coca-Cola commercials of the 1990s.

March of the Penguins scored with families — especially children — to a degree that no nature documentary ever had before. Then, a year later, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth pulled off the same feat, minus the appeal to children. So naturally, Ravetch and Robertson took the next logical step: they made a hybrid of the two Oscar-winning docs, addressing the issue of global warming in overly simplistic terms; they got a popular African American actor to narrate (Queen Latifa), and they even had Al Gore’s daughter write part of the script. And of course, they included as much of that cutsie footage as they could get their hands on that makes audiences go, “aaawwww!” in unison. The result? A flop, at least compared to the other two.

Most critics gave it lukewarm ratings, like the New York Times review that warned viewers that the movie displays “more corn than is usually found at the North Pole,” and that “adults may squirm at the film’s persistent anthropomorphism and Queen Latifah’s cloying narration.”

Is there really something so wrong with injecting a kitschy narrative into a masterfully-shot nature film? On the surface, no; but when you give a serious movie the Disney treatment, you run the risk of not being taken seriously. There is something wrong with playing “We are Family” and “Celebrate” in the same film — especially a nature film. There’s an extended fart scene too. When you bring that sort of stuff in, you risk producing soulless drivel and compromising artistic and intellectual integrity for the sake of “marketability.” Not every nature film needs to be narrated by Sir David Attenborough, and it’s difficult to argue with anything that tries to raise awareness of global warning in younger generations, but there’s got to be a better way of doing that than Arctic Tale.