By Betsy Sherman

The protagonist of this engrossing, and troubling, story must draw on all her accumulated knowledge in order to cope with the degradations to her habitat caused by what we, the viewers, know as global warming/climate change.

Polar Bear, directed by Alastair Fothergill and Jeff Wilson. Streaming on Disney+.

A scene from the documentary Polar Bear. Jeff Wilson/Disney+

Disney’s annual practice of releasing one of their Disneynature family pictures on Earth Day was prevented last year by the pandemic. The event has returned for Earth Day 2022, with the release of Polar Bear, although it’s not opening in theaters in the US; it’s showing exclusively on the Disney+ streaming channel. It’s a shame the tale of a changing Arctic landscape can’t be seen on the big screen, but the diminished scale doesn’t lessen the achievement of this engrossing, and troubling, story of the challenges faced by a female polar bear. The protagonist must draw on all her accumulated knowledge in order to cope with the degradations to her habitat caused by what we, the viewers, know as global warming/climate change.

The new film is fashioned from footage of real animals. It’s in the anthropomorphizing tradition we grew up with, but its emotional button-pushing is more subtle than what I remember from my childhood moviegoing. The directing team of Alastair Fothergill and Jeff Wilson, and writer David Fowler, have deftly assembled a story that has psychological complexity as well as relevance to discussions about the environment. What’s more, the filmmakers made the wonderful and unexpected choice of Catherine Keener (Being John Malkovich, Get Out) for the first-person narration duties.

Like so many stories about us humans, Polar Bear draws on the power of memory to shape its narrative. The dystopia of the present-day threatened Arctic is compared with the relative ease and stability of the past, depicted in flashbacks. Up for scrutiny are words like home, security and — perhaps encompassing both of those — mother. For while the film’s release is geared to Earth Day, it’s also appropriately close to Mother’s Day. The main character presents a loving portrait of her mother, and strives to live up to her mother’s example as she cares for her own girl cub (interestingly, the mother-daughter relationship was also central in Pixar’s Turning Red).

Our narrator remembers herself as a cub. We watch as she and her brother roll in the snow, and splash in the water, with their mother (lots of awww moments here). Polar bears — or as she calls her kind, ice bears — live on the sea ice. It’s on the ice that the mother bear stalks and kills seals, in order to feed her family. Since the story’s being told from the predator’s point of view, we can’t be sentimental about the seals and walruses who are the victims (if they manage to make it into the water, the bears can’t catch them). The major threat, we’re told, are male polar bears, who are bigger than the females and would prey on the cubs.

The girl cub becomes accustomed to change because she sees the seasons change. It’s dark most of the day in the winter, and light most of the day in the summer. During the spring, the bears need to fill up on food, since during the summer the ice floes lose area to melting, and the hunting is very hard (gee Mom, not seaweed for dinner again!).

The filmmakers capture a crazy scene that happens as a consequence of these lean summers. On a chiseled cliff-side where a huge flock of birds have made their nests on jutting pieces of rock, one of those massive male bears is driven by hunger to step precariously among them. Of course the birds will fly away; he’s content to eat their chicks and eggs. So there he is, egg dripping out of his mouth, one crumbling rock away from plunging off the steep cliff. It’s a sight that’s both comical and pathetic, a fall from grace for a noble—in our myths, anyway—creature.

Still, that’s all due to normal seasonal change. Polar Bear wants to show us more. Even over the course of the flashbacks, the female bear sees that conditions are getting palpably worse year by year, especially during the summers. There are changes in prey — beluga whales are coming farther north, for instance — so the mother is having to adapt even as she’s now training her kids how to hunt.

The story has been told in hindsight; from the beginning we’ve seen bears walking through mud. Each subsequent return to “today” reveals a gray-brown world that contrasts with the bright, clean white and blue of memory. The sea ice upon which the bears depend has shrunk drastically. The camera lingers on an expanse of water with reflections of clouds: these suggest the ghosts of ice floes past.

The bear tells us there’s no time for play for her and her daughter, only survival (these could be bywords from fiction’s post-apocalypse genre). Still, there are images that point to hope. The protagonist sits up, an ursine Madonna, nursing her cub. This is how we saw her mother nursing her and her brother, and it provides a comforting sign of continuity.

Finessing these shifts in tone, narrator Catherine Keener is a huge asset. The longtime indie cinema MVP is known for giving a rich interior life to her characters. Here, she finds a balance between exuberance and restraint. The female bear grows from a playful girl into a mature, responsible adult. Building on what she learned from her mother, she tries to teach her daughter what she will need to carry on. “But,” she tells us, “I am reaching the limits of what I know about this world.” It’s a devastating line of dialogue, one that should hit home as viewers think about our own kind, as well as about hers.

Text at the end of the film gives us some alarming statistics (if nothing is done to reverse course) and points us towards the site Polar Bears International for further information and to donate.

Betsy Sherman has written about movies, old and new, for the Boston Globe, Boston Phoenix, and Improper Bostonian, among others. She holds a degree in archives management from Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. When she grows up, she wants to be Barbara Stanwyck.