How artistically fitting, then, that writer-director Luc Jacquet and his team of National Geographic photographers not only did not anthropomorphize the birds but did not even select particular penguins to be the heroes of the tale.

Just as she existentially anthropomorphizes the mouse and empathizes with its maternal responsibilities, she ruminates on the question of the commonalties and differences between a dead chicken and a dead man, thus investing a sort of shared humanity between the two: "And yet the chicken was a sort of person, a respectable individual, with its own kind of dignity.

It's hard not to anthropomorphize the scene she describes as consultation: "They have it in their mandibles, and they pass it to each other.