For the chick to survive, both parents must make multiple arduous journeys between the ocean and the breeding grounds over the ensuing months.

It took one year for the two isolated cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jérôme Maison to shoot the documentary, which was shot around the French scientific base of Dumont d'Urville in Adélie Land.

At the end of Antarctic summer, the breeding ground is only a few hundred meters away from the open water where the penguins can feed.

After the female lays the egg, she transfers it to the feet of the waiting male with minimal exposure to the elements, as the intense cold could kill the developing embryo.

The male has not eaten in two months and by the time the female leaves the hatching area, she will have lost a third of her body weight producing the egg.

The death of a chick is tragic, but it does allow the parents to return to the sea to feed for the rest of the breeding season.

Many parents die on the trip, killed by exhaustion or by predators (such as the leopard seal), dooming their chicks back at the breeding ground.

The parents must then tend to the chick for an additional four months, shuttling back and forth to the sea to provide food for their young.

[8] Director and film crew spent more than 13 months at the Dumont d'Urville Station, where the Institut polaire français Paul-Émile Victor is based.

They worked in winds with gusts up to 125 miles per hour, "which in some ways is worse than the cold temperatures" according to director Jaquet.

The original French-language release features a romanticized first-person narrative as if the story is being told by the penguins themselves.

For example, in the Hungarian version, actors Ákos Kőszegi, Anna Kubik, and Gábor Morvai provide the voices of the penguins, and the German version as seen in German movie theaters (and in the televised broadcast in April 2007 on channel ProSieben) uses the voices of Andrea Loewig, Thorsten Michaelis, and Adrian Kilian for the "dubbed dialog" of the penguins.

The French release was handled by Buena Vista International France, a division of Walt Disney Studios.

[12][13] In contrast to the French version, their English release uses a more traditional third-person narrative by a single voice, actor Morgan Freeman.

Subsequently, Warner Bros and National Geographic's English-language version was released in the rest of North America on 24 June 2005, drawing huge praise from most critics who found it both informative and charming.

The website's critical consensus states, "Only the most hardened soul won't be moved by this heartwarming doc".

[14] Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 79 out of 100, based on 39 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

[18] The documentary attracted some political and social commentary in which the penguins were viewed anthropomorphically as having similarities with, and even lessons for, human society.

[19] Medved's comments provoked responses by others, including Andrew Sullivan,[20] who pointed out that the penguins are not in fact monogamous for more than one year, in reality practicing serial monogamy.

Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, reported in the magazine's blog that the BBC "have been harassing me for days over March of the Penguins ... about what, I'm not sure.

'"[24] Another controversy involves those who feel that the emperor penguin's behavior can be viewed as an indication of intelligent design and those who consider it to be an example of evolution by natural selection in action.

Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, is quoted as saying, "Supporters of intelligent design think that if they see something they don't understand, it must be God; they fail to recognise that they themselves are part of evolution.

"[25] Author Susan Jacoby claims in her 2008 book, The Age of American Unreason, that the distributors of the movie deliberately avoided using the word "evolution" in order to avoid backlash from the American religious right, and writes, "As it happens, the emperor penguin is literally a textbook example, cited in college-level biology courses, of evolution by means of natural selection and random mutation.

The financial wisdom of avoiding any mention of evolution was borne out at the box office ..."[26] March of the Penguins 2: The Next Step (French: L'Empereur) was released by Disneynature in France on 15 February 2017, with narration by Lambert Wilson.