Original subtitles

1960 - The first recording of a whale singing.

1997 - Aboard the Voyager probe, that song travels across the galaxy.

The whales are communicating.

They may have something to tell us.

To this day, no one's been able to interpret their message.

The very first sound we hear when we come into this world is a song.

Our mothers lift us to the surface in music

for our first breath of air.

Here, in this amniotic paradise,

we play.

We do somersaults,

like angels or birds.

You know,

it all began 50 million years ago.

One day, in search of food or sanctuary,

our ancestors left the land

and walked into the sea.

Freed from earthly pressures,

freed from droughts,

sheltered from earthquakes,

from Ice Ages,

from volcanoes,

from fires and famine,

our bodies adapted to life in suspension.

We learned to hold our breath.

Our hind legs disappeared, buried deep within our flanks.

Our tails turned into boomerang-shaped tail-flukes,

enabling us to fly, almost weightless, through oceans.

Our skin thickened.

Smooth,

silky,

freed of all obstacles.

Yielding to our movements,

gliding through water

in perfect hydrodynamics.

Naked,

with skin like oiled silk,

we move at fifty miles an hour.

A velvety energy.

One morning,

playing with the echoes in the depths,

we began to sing.

Communicating with one another,

exchanging information underwater.

And over tremendous distances.

Melodies traveling through oceans

five times faster than the speed of sound through air.

Interconnected to one another,

we wove an elegant web of cetacean music.

The very first social network, which we created in the ocean,

45 million years ago.

Notes... clicks...

Different phrases, different dialects...

Sung in different cadences

and modulations.

Just like you,

to send different messages to different individuals.

Each clan has its own accent. Each of us, a different song.

Varied enough to express complex emotions.

We sing for the planet Earth.

In harmony with the frequency of the stars.

We all come from different regions,

and rarely cross paths.

But sometimes,

a few of us meet in secret places.

To enrich our repertoires

and play one another's compositions.

The great whale karaoke!

Our world is not a "silent world."

We glide through a sea of sounds.

Our planet's oceans are a concert hall,

where operas swell.

A light massage of sound

caressing our skin permanently.

Focused, we listen,

analyze,

scan...

Millions of musical notes, mysterious sounds,

memorized and passed on from generation to generation.

Preserved in our mighty cortex,

with no need for computers or hard disks.

We record everything.

And share everything.

The past, the present,

culture and history.

We pick up

every frequency in the world, and always have.

We are the guardians of the Earth's archives.

Two probes and an ultra-sophisticated vision system

allow some of us to see in the dark.

To reach greater depths,

sperm whales

use lower frequencies.

Rumbling like generators,

with a wavering transoceanic throb,

they scan the inky submarine relief.

Holding their breath, sperm whales plunge almost 3,000 meters deep...

dropping their heartbeat, collapsing their lungs,

and contracting their ribs

to stave off the bends.

Their jaws become fluorescent to attract prey.

They happily slip through the pressure of 500 atmospheres,

a quarter of a million tons of water

exerted on their bodies.

With oxygen reserves buried in their muscles,

they can disappear for over an hour

in the black night of the depths...

their Abyss Kingdom.

The oceans are home to our planet's most spectacular reliefs.

Our highest peaks are found underwater.

Far higher than Annapurna or Mount Everest.

The widest valleys,

the deepest canyons on this planet.

Landscapes we've been exploring for millions of years.

All our life, we're guided by the same ritual.

We spend winter where we were born,

in the warm waters where we'll mate.

And summer, in cold waters, with the promise of nourishment.

Each family has its own route,

which every generation has taken.

Each hemisphere has its tribes and their paths.

During our travel,

whenever a storm arises,

despite the vigor of currents and the violent waves,

in the underwater calm,

we stay our course.

Surfing and sliding with joy.

To find our way,

we use the rhythm and temperature of the tides,

the contours of the seabed,

the mountainous summits of the mid-Atlantic ridge,

the rotational forces of the planet, and the azimuth of the sun.

Guided by the position of the moon and its tidal pull,

navigating with a lodestone disc made of polarized magnetite...

a GPS in our huge brain,

sensitive to the geomagnetic flow of force fields...

we orient ourselves under phosphorescent seas.

Thanks to the position of the stars,

we find the path of the Poles,

the route of the icebergs.

Like us, icebergs sing their songs.

Like us,

they migrate and cross our path.

Like us,

they roll and tumble.

Their immersed bodies surging up with a mighty splash.

And their souls appear.

Antarctica!

For us, southern hemisphere humpback whales,

here ends our summer migration.

We're not compulsive eaters.

We can go eight months without food.

We don't work to eat.

We play!

By making bubbles.

We draw spirals in the water.

We release bubble nets!

Nets that rise to the surface

and burst in the open air...

trapping shrimp and krill

in a hissing, almost perfect circle.

Which we dive into, our mouths wide open.

Imagine blowing soap bubbles and food drops from the sky!

After a season of bubble-netting,

tracing evanescent contours in the sea,

we leave our ice palaces and find our way back to warm waters.

The lagoon route, where we were born.

Sometimes accompanied by a distant sound.

The most powerful in the animal kingdom.

A song that can be heard over a thousand kilometers...

the song of a blue whale.

The most imposing of us all.

170 tons.

The weight of 2,700 people.

Larger than a dinosaur.

It has seven stomachs and consumes over a million calories a day.

Its tongue outweighs an elephant.

Arteries you could swim through.

It's the largest creature ever to have lived upon this planet.

It, too, is on the trail to equatorial waters.

8,000 kilometers and several months later...

Reaching the land of love,

sealed off from the outside world by riptides...

all is pleasure and play, song and seduction.

In warm water,

we roll over,

undulate.

We glide past each other with a contemplative murmur.

Testing our feelings, evaluating the flexibility of our movements.

We humpback whales

are known for our long, melodious love songs.

When a female leads the dance,

she's followed by a trail of admirers.

There begins the great pursuit.

Spent, certain suitors abandon the chase,

yielding their position to the more valiant.

To he who blows the largest bubbles and makes the loudest noise.

And to increase her chances of childbearing,

our females mate with different partners throughout the season.

Elsewhere,

across the equator,

when winter arrives,

the gray whales, too, make their way to the lagoons.

The gray whale ritual of love often involves a trio

of one female and two males.

Devoid of any jealousy or rivalry,

one male might even encourage the other to mate with the female.

To maintain a population equilibrium,

she's the one who decides to reproduce.

And only depending upon the amount of food available in the sea.

Mammals, like you,

we nurse, like you, on our mother's milk.

For a few months, for baleen whales.

Over a year, for toothed whales.

A milk so rich

it fattens us up quickly,

to gain strength to face the ocean.

For us cetaceans,

maternal care goes on for a long time.

And our mother's attention is constant.

To get some rest,

she can count on the support of a sister, an aunt or a cousin.

And in our education,

solidarity comes first.

From her, we learn to breathe,

to swim,

to communicate,

to mimic the sounds of adults.

Our mothers often take us to sandy, shallow seabeds,

which muffle our noisy attempts at song.

To keep them from spreading too far

and alerting potential predators.

Right whales, like all whales,

develop deep emotional bonds with our mothers,

sharing with her

the first years of our lives.

These first moments in the ocean are all mirth and joy.

Carefree years,

surfing in the wake of our mother,

crossing the world in the currents of her trail.

In the cold waters of the north,

under a frosted ceiling,

bowhead whales sing.

We sometimes cross paths, but they don't migrate to the equator.

They spend all year in icy waters.

Surely, the secret to their longevity.

Some live up to 240 years.

When the Arctic steps out of darkness and awakens from its endless winter,

the sun melts the ice

and opens a path for the bowheads, from east to west.

Their song is less classical than ours.

Bowheads are more into jazz.

A set they change every year,

composed over long polar nights.

The Inuit say

that the whale is the daughter of Sedna,

goddess of the sea.

That goddess's fingers gave birth to the fish.

Her hands, to seals, otters and other sea mammals.

And her forearms, to whales.

The Kwakiutl

from Alert Bay

believe the whale is "a long-life maker" and brings prosperity.

The Nootka people

claim we agree to die to spare Man from hunger.

Therefore, they must be worthy of it.

But other men, for centuries,

chose to see us as an essential element of an expanding economy.

After tens of millions of years

alone, undisturbed in the open seas,

one day...

With no real enemies, until man showed up,

we never understood why we were attacked.

Some of us who survived an attack

alerted other groups, warning them of impending danger.

We developed a training program

to teach the younger whales defense tactics.

We changed our trajectories,

sailing against the wind to gain ground on our assailants.

And sometimes, to protect our families,

we were forced to attack.

When the whaleboats capsized

and sailors floundered helplessly in the sea

forgiving, mammals like them

we came to their rescue, carrying them on our backs,

until they revived...

To kill us again.

Despite that,

the dark shorelines began to twinkle.

Each new glimmer

marking the loss of one of ours.

In the areas we used to frequent,

modest fishing villages became cities.

Illuminated by whale oil.

Biarritz,

Boston,

New York,

Tokyo, Lisbon, Vancouver,

Buenos Aires,

Valparaiso, London,

Sydney, Hamburg...

The list goes on.

The unavowed massacre of millions of our sister whales,

hacked up on whaling boats over the centuries.

Killed for a world that longed for "progress".

For more than two centuries, we furnished every industry.

From food to cosmetics.

From automobiles to space exploration.

From textiles to weapons.

Without the blood of whales,

industrial revolutions would have been ill-equipped.

Large creatures disappear, life becomes smaller.

We've also witnessed your fratricidal conflicts on the oceans.

We've watched you destroy each other.

And that, we really couldn't understand.

Some of us, over two centuries old,

have lived to see four industrial revolutions.

We've seen more and more ships casting their shadows.

Ripping into the depths.

The soft music of the ocean has changed.

A mechanical cacophony - loud,

explosive, disrupting all marine life,

our communication

and our navigational systems.

Then strange creatures appeared

in multiple colors and curious forms.

And, one night, we saw new stars.

A succession of satellites outlining luminous points,

modifying the map of the sky we've always known.

All that blue

doesn't exist only to be admired by a traveler from space.

These immense expanses of indigo

provide almost all the oxygen inhaled on our planet.

We whales

are in charge of the world�s breath.

In the oceans,

minuscule creatures invisible to the human eye

work busily to create this atom essential to life.

This extraordinary phytoplankton

in myriad colors and forms

produce as much oxygen as all the most beautiful forests on Earth.

Sowers of the seas,

we nourish these vast prairies of phytoplankton.

That's why, if we disappear,

phytoplankton will disappear, too.

That will destroy the planet's climate,

which we've regulated for millions of years.

Then the sky would drain of its color,

like on Venus or Mars.

Darkening.

Taking the atmosphere with it,

like a dying man, sucking his last breath through his teeth.

Earth is an oasis lost in an ocean of stars.

These planktonic organisms

are the origin of life,

the very first link in the food chain.

The more we eat,

the more the phytoplankton eats.

Feeding the ocean and the entire world.

You know, on this planet,

it's always been us...

All living beings, interconnected,

regulating the Earth�s systems.

And we each have a role

in the preservation of life.

If one link breaks,

all living beings would be in danger.

All intelligent life:

we whales,

but also elephants,

bees,

chimpanzees,

and you too - mankind.

Solidarity,

compassion...

In the end, we have a lot in common.

One day maybe

human beings will cooperate with ocean mammals peacefully.

One day maybe,

we'll manage to communicate

and share our common experiences on this planet.

The moment the last frame of this film was cut,

the Voyager probe was 23,558,175,505 km from Earth.

It's carrying the whales' song to the Ophiuchus constellation

and will enter the Gliese 445 solar system

in about 40,000 years.