Hidden Kingdoms

This three-episode BBC series (which aired in the U.S. on the Discovery Channel sporting the semi-absurd title Mini Monsters) presents a spectacular high-tech look at some of the smaller denizens of the animal kingdom—filmed from wide-and-low-angle POVs in environments around the world. Rodents tend to predominate, including the lightning-fast little elephant shrew of Kenya, which zips around a network of well-memorized ground trails (another shrew, the ever-hungry tree shrew of Borneo, is here stalked by a snake). The grasshopper mouse of Arizona boasts the speed and favorable biology to be able to defeat and eat scorpions. The final episode travels to urban environments in Rio and Tokyo to track the odysseys of a pair of lost critters—a marmoset monkey and a rhinoceros beetle—capturing their encounters with predators that are well-adapted to the city. Nature-film purists may rightfully cry foul after watching the bonus “making-of” featurettes, which reveal that all of this was carefully scripted, storyboarded, and even blue-screen superimposed, achieving a deceit that sometimes seems practically Orwellian (close-ups of the marmosets of "Rio," for instance, were actually shot at a marmoset shelter in England and composited with Brazilian footage). Still, for all of the fakery, Hidden Kingdoms serves up many memorable and even breathtaking HD moments, backed up—one hopes—with valid science, not simulacra. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (C. Cassady)