昨天是“世界地球日”。为了让更多观众通过电影“认识地球，和谐发展”，美国迪斯尼电影公司宣布，正式推出全新的高端制片品牌“迪斯尼自然”。该系列专门制作关于野生动植物以及环境的纪录片，计划每年至少推出一部，首个项目是将于2009年推出的《地球》。

A still photograph from the upcoming 2009 Disneynature film "Earth" from the new film label "Disneynature" launched by The Walt Disney Co. April 21, 2008 which will feature wildlife and environmental movies for theaters is pictured in this undated publicity photograph.[Agencies]

The entertainment giant on Monday announced the launch of a new film label, Disneynature, dedicated to producing wildlife and environmental documentaries for the big screen, starting with a 2009 US release titled Earth.

The new venture marks one of the most conspicuous moves by a major Hollywood studio to capitalize on growing public fondness for all things green since the 2006 success of Al Gore's global warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

"Our goal is to bring event films, as only nature can tell, to audiences around the world and for generations to come," Dick Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Studios, said in unveiling the production banner on the Disney lot in Burbank, California.

Cook said he expected Disneynature to produce roughly one film for commercial release each year.

The new label will be run by Jean-Francois Camilleri, a veteran France-based Disney executive who co-produced the surprise 2005 hit March of the Penguins, which won the Oscar for best documentary the year before Inconvenient Truth did.

The first US release from the new venture, slated to debut on Earth Day, April 22, 2009, is titled Earth, adapted from popular BBC television series Planet Earth.

Narrated by actor James Earl Jones, it will explore animal migration patterns, focusing on the journeys of polar bears, elephants and humpback whales over the course of a single year.

Shot over 2,000 days in more than 200 locations spanning every continent, it marks an unprecedented achievement in nature movies, said its British producer-director, Alastair Fothergill, whose credits include acclaimed marine documentary series The Blue Planet.

"Nobody has spent so much time, ever, making a wildlife film," he said, adding that he has long felt confined by the medium of TV as a nature documentarian.

"Cinema is the place that does justice to the natural world."

Besides aerial and underwater photography, Earth features intimate glimpses of wildlife made possible by new technology that allow helicopter-mounted cameras to capture close-ups of animals from a greater distance than ever before.

Similarly, The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos, scheduled to open in France in December 2008, will take viewers to the remote shores of a Tanzanian lake where fewer humans have ventured than have set foot on the moon, the filmmakers said.

（China Daily/Agencies）

Vocabulary:

documentarian：记录片导演(或制片人)

flamingo: 火烈鸟

(英语点津Celene编辑)