Imagine the romantic streaks of “March of the Penguins” mashed together with the fear and foreboding of “An Inconvenient Truth,” and you can start to appreciate the bizarre juggling act under way in “Arctic Tale,” the latest nature documentary hoping for success on the big screen.

The film’s early segments are as derivative as its later revelations are astonishing. Once the tale gets away from the cute and cuddly creatures that populate the arctic region and moves toward the business of the rapidly changing climate of the Arctic Circle, “Arctic Tale” proves itself a compelling distraction from the summer fodder littering far too many of the city’s theaters.

The film’s most enduring image — pulled from a wealth of mesmerizing sights captured by the husband-and-wife directing team of Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson during more than a decade of returning north with their cameras — is that of a two-year-old polar bear stranded on a sheet of ocean ice that is only a few inches thick, bobbing up and down with the waves, precariously close to falling through.

By this point, we’ve come to learn quite a bit about Nanu, the human name by which Queen Latifah, who plays the role of omniscient narrator in “Arctic Tale,” has given to this wild polar bear. As Mr. Ravetch and Ms. Robertson present it, we have already witnessed the very first day that young Nanu pops her head out of her mother’s snow den; we watch as she learns to hunt and avoid the aggressive male polar bears that live nearby; we watch through the blizzard as her frail brother struggles to overcome starvation; and we despair when she is abandoned by her mother.

Now, out on her own in the wild, in an ever-warming world where the ice is forming later and melting earlier than ever before, she finds herself on this undulating ice bed, marching ever forward under the most precarious of circumstances due to hunger and desperation.

Meanwhile, much as we’ve watched Nanu, we have also been introduced to young Seela, a female walrus who is being cared for by her mother and aunt as she tries to grow into an adult and avoid death at the hands of the polar bears hunting nearby. As the ice melts around her and her family, the herd is forced to make a mad dash across the open water to a faraway island — the same island to which Nanu is forced to swim as she smells her prey abandoning the once-frozen hunting grounds.

It is on this island where the polar bears and walruses collide in ways never before seen, and where we witness, over the span of only a few years, the evolution of an entirely new migration pattern and hunting scheme. Here, we see nature adapting to the changing world, to the receding arctic habitat.

In journalistic terms, what Mr. Ravetch and Ms. Robertson have done here is bury the lede. The most interesting story to be told is the one that’s pushed to the latter half of the film, buried beneath 30 minutes of goofy music and sight gags, of scenes such as a young Seela basking in the sun with her herd and farting up a storm after a feast of clams. In television terms, the directors have made half their film the equivalent of a rerun, rehashing the arctic experience as it has been shown so many times before on basic cable, and most recently in the brilliant Discovery Channel miniseries “Planet Earth.”

There’s no denying, though, that we can see in the movie’s later segments the gradual breakdown of an ecosystem. In two of the most emotional scenes of the film, we see how the smallest of changes to the region’s seasonal cycle can affect a species. For years, Nanu’s mother has hunted with her nose, sniffing out the snow caves where adult seals have placed their young and pouncing through the surface to snatch up those newborns — a quick feast for her, as well as Nanu and her brother. But with too little snow to build caves, and no baby seals to hunt, Nanu must watch her brother starve, and her mother morph, in the span of a year, into an enemy — pushing away the offspring for which she can no longer provide.

Some have referred to “Arctic Tale” — which is released by National Geographic Films, the same distributor that brought America the French-created “March of the Penguins” — as a harbinger of nature documentaries to come, all hoping to recapture the success of “Penguins.” What’s troublesome about movies like this is the way they dumb down nature, in this instance giving the animals human names, describing their lives in human terms, and matching their adventures with a pounding soundtrack of pop tunes. In the process, they are manipulating what is essentially billed as an “objective” recording of nature into something as molded and scripted as any narrative film.

Really, what makes critics of both “Penguins” and “Arctic Tale” so skeptical is this notion of Nature Lite, of nature packaged up with a pretty, and thus superficial, pink bow. “Arctic Tale” nearly falls into this trap, opting to go silly before it goes serious. But once it diverts from the cuddly polar bear family to point our attention toward the profound forces tearing their world apart, the film proves that the substantive tale it wants to relay is one that truly needs to be told.

The second half of “Arctic Tale” is better than anything in “March of the Penguins”: it should set the standard by which all nature documentaries are judged: What do you have to tell us that’s new, that’s interesting enough to take our two hours, our $10, and a screen at our favorite movie theater?

ssnyder@nysun.com