Over the years there have been many films featuring relationships/friendship between humans and animals. Mostly cats and dogs, but sometimes, horses, pigs, and other types of animals. As the title suggests the latest movie about a human who befriends an animal is My Penguin Friend.  It’s a sweet little movie with a big heart and a good message to go along with it. I’d be surprised if families didn’t like this story based on real-life events.

It’s about a penguin, named DinDim by a little girl in the village, who veers off course from his fellow penguins who are migrating from Patagonia, Argentina, and ends up on a small island off the coast of Rio De Janeiro,  Brazil. covered in oil. Where he meets an old fisherman who lives in a shack by the ocean, and nurses him back to health. The fisherman, Joao (Jean Reno), and his wife Maria (Adriana Buraza) have experienced a tragedy very recently and they think this miracle is a sign. 

The story gets out, in the form of a viral video, and journalists get a sniff of the story, but DinDim gets around as well. Some animal rights activists mark/track and keep an eye on him. Conservationists want to study him, but his home is the two islands he migrates from every six months with his fellow penguins and his adopted home of Ilha Grande. These are the places he truly belongs in the end.

With the movie being about a penguin it was going to be interesting to see how his viewpoint was depicted in the film. How it was depicted on the screen was stunningly realized.  Various underwater cameras and swimming scenes showed the migration of DinDim and his fellow brothers and sisters. The cameras were underwater and they showed how these animals swam against the ocean stream to go where they needed each year. These were gorgeous sequences in the movie. I was taken aback by how truly majestic these moments were. 

Two other technical aspects I noticed that were very good were the score by Fernando Velasquez which was quite nicely added to the film. The music mirrored this story in a lot of ways. It was a beautiful piece of music. The second is the editing during the swimming upstream scenes involving the penguins. The filmmakers must have had hours of footage that was edited into what was in the movie. All of these sequences were impeccably done.

Animals and humans have a special bond. Animals can sense pain and hard times in humans. It just so happens this bird was fed and helped by this man and so their bond became more than normal for this species.  This bond helped the old fisherman overcome a difficult time in his life. Even his wife noticed him coming back to her. She previously thought him lost. This animal/bond saved him in more ways than imaginable for everyone involved. I was genuinely moved by this film.

My Penguin Friend takes an animal/human friendship to a level hitherto unseen before.  The sweetness of this story is one I haven’t seen much in movies such as this very often.  The technical aspects of the camerawork, editing, and the score were all very well done. The director David Schurmann took a tried and true genre that has been done quite often and gave it a breath of ocean air. Reno and Buraza were perfectly cast as this old couple. I was completely invested in this little story from beginning to end. Hopefully, others will be as well.

4 stars

Dan Skip Allen