The Obama couple, who formed a production company and teamed up with Netflix in 2018, just launched Our Great National Parks. Inspired by the ways of National Geographic and Disney, the documentary miniseries highlights protected territories on five continents, a way for the former president of the United States to inspire action for the protection of wildlife. and the environment.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
Hanauma Bay, in Hawaii, is not a natural reserve like the others in the eyes of Barack Obama. His mother frequented it a lot when she was pregnant with him and his beaches marked his youth. This is where we find the former president in the first scene ofOur Great National Parksa five-episode documentary series devoted to protected territories around the world, which are both places where animals live without being under threat from humans and spaces that act as ramparts against the destruction of the planet.
Obama the naturalist? The idea may surprise, but it is rooted in some of his political gestures: during his two terms as head of the United States, Barack Obama protected more than 550 million acres of territory. It is more than any other president, specifies Netflix, which confirms the National Wildlife Federation, American non-governmental organization.
Entitled A world of wonders in its French version, the first episode offers an overview of the diversity of protected areas and their biodiversity. Leaving from Hawaii, we travel to Gabon (in one of the rare tropical forests on the west coast of Africa which still touches the Atlantic), to Madagascar (where we follow lemurs through an impressive forest formed by peaks of limestone) or in Yellowstone, a territory of 9000 km2 protected since 1872, making it the oldest national park in the United States.
Animals at the heart of the story
The gaze becomes clearer in the second episode, devoted to Chile. The longest country in the world has established a network of 24 national parks and nature reserves in Patagonia, which range from the northern forests to Tierra del Fuego, passing through the Andean plains. Where sheep once grazed, today live and breed guanacos (undomesticated cousins of the llama and alpaca) and their biggest predator, the puma. We also learn that Chile is currently working to create corridors between its protected areas to promote the movement of animals, a gesture welcomed by Obama.
Series Our Great National Parks does not reinvent the genre: in the wake of National Geographic documentaries, it takes an attentive look at wildlife, visibly using all available technologies to observe animals up close, but also to offer bird’s-eye views breathtaking of the territories where they live.
Obama, generally warm and relaxed, uses these images to tell stories, much like Disney does in its films devoted to monkeys or lions. A beetle or a young condor thus become, for the duration of a segment, the main characters of adventures that have been perpetuated for millennia.
The editing reinforces this narrative approach which relies on the personification of animals. For example, during two fight scenes (one between two beetles, the other between two guanacos), close-ups of the opponents’ heads are interspersed with more general sequences, making the insects seem like and camelids shot boxing scenes for the cinema! These tricks, like the narration, put some humor into the shows.
The other three episodes of the documentary miniseries will focus on Tsavo National Park, Kenya (where elephants, hippos and rhinos live together), Monterey Bay, United States (where it will be about the cohabitation between humans and nature on the California coast) and finally at Gunung Leuser National Park in Indonesia. The synopsis of this last episode is the most dramatic: it is here that the most endangered species on the planet would be found, including the Sumatran tiger. Our Great National Parks is an informative series, but also very clearly a political gesture for the former president, who underlines in each episode the importance of natural spaces in the fight against global warming.
Our Great National Parksavailable now on Netflix