Mammoth Journey

I own nothing.  After this, I’m giving the Admirable Animations/Animated Atrocities meme a rest.

The mammoths had always been mainstream popular animals.  Prior to “Mammoth Journey”, Discovery had already done three—“Resurrecting the Mammoth”, “Raising the Mammoth” and “Land of the Mammoth”, so I had an idea where the last episode of the sequel would be going.

“Mammoth Journey” is different from the other three in that, true to Walking with fashion, there are no talking head interviews and the animals aren’t reduced to B footage.  (Ice Age Giants, take note!)  The story here is a herd of woolly mammoths spending the summer in the grasslands of the North Sea and the winter in the Alpine foothills.  Only three members of the herd have front-seat focus—the matriarch, “a veteran of some forty winters” and a mother and her calf, who both lag behind the herd during the journey, putting both of their lives at risk.  From the fossil evidence, we can have an idea that wolves, lions, hyenas and bears have the potential to hunt mammoth calves in Europe.  But here, there was only one Cave Lion stalking the mother and her baby.  It raises the stakes enough for us to be concerned as to what happens next.

In the entire sequel, Ben Bartlett’s score is strongest in the final episode.  It has the grace and majesty of “Time of the Titans” and the ethereality of “Spirits of the Ice Forest”.  In true BBC style, it doesn’t bother using the modern or techno feelings that we hear in the other episodes.

Like the final episode of Walking with Dinosaurs, the final episode of Walking with Beasts ends on that same high note—flipping us back to the 21^st century and reminisce on the journey we just had.  As the camera moves around the Natural History Museum in London, the narrator gives us the moral of the entire sequel:

“No species lasts forever.”

On its own, Walking with Beasts is an interesting ride.  As a sequel to Walking with Dinosaurs, the quality is still high, but there are some moments where it seems to dip.  Still, it’s worth watching again and again.

In the event you’re curious, I won’t do any more Walking with episodes or the whole of Impossible Pictures, for that matter.  Too much was done, and I won’t do Primeval for reasons that really have nothing to do with the show at all.

That being said, I still hope you enjoyed all my Admirable Animations on the two biggest pieces of the Walking with universe.