There isn’t a penguin in sight throughout An Arctic Tale, which should surprise no schoolchild who knows that those birds that have been the subject of so many recent family films reside primarily in the Antarctic. Instead, the heroines of this live-action nature movie are a young walrus and a young polar bear, whom we follow from birth as they grow up in a land where the temperatures routinely reach minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. But while their species are well-adapted toward life in this icy world, they face drastic changes as global warming alters the seasonal patterns on which they depend. An Arctic Tale was compiled from 800 hours of footage shot over a 15-year period by Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson. Their dedication is unquestionable, and some of the scenes they captured clearly came about only from their willingness to devote so much time to the project. So it’s forgivable that they allowed their material to be shaped into an anthropomorphized storyline in which many animals take the place of two. But I can’t help but wish that the story weren’t so written down for the tastes of audiences under the age of 10 (largely by Linda Woolverton, whose credits include Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Homeward Bound and The Lion King). It’s narrated by Queen Latifah in a voice you might employ for a bedtime story, directed toward the tastes of small children who find nothing funnier than flatulence. In the National Geographic television specials that I grew up on, the fact that you could see the explorers and filmmakers helped give what we were watching an element of realism that is ironically absent here: By removing themselves from their film, they make it easier for us to think of what we see as just another computer-generated fiction. That’s somewhat counterproductive for a movie that wants to energize its young viewers into ecologically proactive behavior.