This educational film (by the director Mary Field, who produced other nature documentaries in a similar wry style) sets out to impart information on the reproductive habits of various creatures to the young mind, thanks to some painstaking time-lapse photography and some close-up film of various animals -- although the more exotic species appear to have been filmed in the Zoo! So far as this goes it is reasonably informative and interesting, and I encountered a few facts about plant strategies for seed dissemination that I hadn't known before. (I did also spot a couple of errors of fact: so far as I'm aware, frogs are not reptiles and alligators are actually very attentive mothers...)
However, the novel and memorable twist here is to reverse the usual sex-education trope in which "the birds and the bees" stand proxy for human activity; in this film, animal behaviour is illustrated by using human examples. The result is often very funny, as in the cuts between praying-mantis females and the icy glances of rival Society ladies, or between the male preening himself and the young man stroking his moustache.
However, the novel and memorable twist here is to reverse the usual sex-education trope in which "the birds and the bees" stand proxy for human activity; in this film, animal behaviour is illustrated by using human examples. The result is often very funny, as in the cuts between praying-mantis females and the icy glances of rival Society ladies, or between the male preening himself and the young man stroking his moustache.
