Sorry, Sir David: there's no science to the life of an emperor penguin. It's all about love

Talk about shift parenting. Imagine doing it like this. If you want kids, you must walk 70 miles, non-stop, with a whole bunch of other hopefuls, in one of the coldest, driest and most uninhabitable destinations on earth. It's also very dark.

If you tire, slide a few hundred metres on your belly. Eventually, you arrive at a freezing terrain blasted by icy winds. This is where you find your partner. Hopefully. You mate.

Baby arrives in the form of a large pointy egg, which must be kept warm. But you are in a giant freezer, so it falls to one of you to keep it off the ice. This job is done by Dad, who carefully takes the egg and positions it on his feet. Some silly dads drop their eggs. The careful ones gently swathe theirs in the fat of their bellies. Handily, they are all rather portly.

Mum, meanwhile, has to walk back to where everyone started, 70 miles off, to find food. In the dark. Leaving Dad standing in a blizzard with all the other dads and their eggs. For two months. Just as the weather is at its worst, the egg hatches and a tiny goggle-eyed chick appears. It starts up a dreadful bleeping and squeaking.

But Dad is also hungry. In fact, he hasn't had a meal for four months. Fortunately, he has a tiny morsel of food which he has secreted in a tiny pouch in his neck. Clever man! He gives it to Junior. This staves off the bleeps for about two days.

If Mum isn't on the horizon by now, it's curtains. She arrives just in time and is introduced to the baby by Dad, by now remarkably thin, having lost half his body weight. He goes off for food, has a couple of meals and comes back so Mum can take a break, and so on.

Welcome to the life of the emperor penguin, whose breeding cycle is revealed in March of the Penguins, coming to a big screen near you. This utterly gripping film is of course founded on an illusion, as it uses the old saw of ascribing key human characteristics to its subject, in this case several hundred emperor penguins.

The voiceover (which is thrillingly delivered by Morgan Freeman) begins by calling the epic a "story of love", when, indeed, it might be something else entirely which our solipsism won't or can't brook.

But then if the film was just about birds, we wouldn't enjoy it so much. At one point, when negotiating a particularly tough glacier, Freeman describes the penguins as "stumped", ascribing a sort of Scott of the Antarctic doggedness to creatures who have been calmly inhabiting the South Pole for thousands of years.

When one of the mums loses her chick, well, you can almost sense a tear fall from that beady eye. You expect to see her heave her heavy frame around and waddle off, an avian version of Captain Oates. Instead, she hones in on another mother and tries to steal her chick. Let's put that down to hormones.

Bar this scary instance, the penguins are stolid and comforting; their chicks impossibly vulnerable, quivering bundles of fluff with, Freeman reminds us, "tiny, beating hearts". It's quite overwhelming.

When I got home, exhausted with empathy, my husband asked what the difference was between this film and something that, say, David Attenborough might produce. "Nothing really," I sniff. "Except there was no science in it. It was all about love."

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