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Perhaps that is exactly what you need after the gray winter of a terribly gray year: the indestructible David Attenborough, who steps on a distant dream beach in the usual bright blue shirt and reminds you: Life is colorful.

Attenborough will be 95 years old in a few days, he has been shooting nature documentaries for an incredible 70 years, and it must be his never-ending enthusiasm for life that statistically makes him the most admired man in Great Britain.

Sir David's classics are called "Life on Earth" (1979), "The Life of Mammals" (2002) or "Eisige Welten" (2011), but as heavy as his work is: The BBC veteran has entered the streaming age with great ease - to Netflix - switched.

But change is his business: Attenborough is probably the longest-serving evolutionist advertising man.

Enthusiasm incarnated: David Attenborough in "Life in Color"

Source: / Netflix

Beyond the rainbow

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It remains the same that for him only the best nature filmmakers shoot with the best technology, who then only get rid of their most beautiful pictures in the film.

Depictions of misery are not Attenborough's thing, and this time, too, the climate crisis and coral bleaching are relegated to the appendix, at the end of the third and last episode, which mainly explains how the team of filmmakers and researchers managed to do it in the first place: to show colors that we do People do not see.

The tiger as we see it

Source: / Netflix

The tiger, how it merges with its surroundings with lower contrasts

Source: / Netflix

But humans are actually good color seers. Only what lies beyond the rainbow remains hidden from him - which puts him in a better position than the South Indian deer that Attenborough's team observed. Your greatest enemy is the majestic tiger, who in the overgrown jungle would do well to camouflage themselves with a green coat. Unfortunately, however, he is a mammal and mammals cannot produce greenery biochemically - as practical as that would be.

Deer, however, are color-blind and lack the receptor to distinguish red from green.

In the film we see the tiger out of her eyes, which means: we don't actually see him;

one of the world's most dangerous robbers works with an optical illusion.

Whereby: The cat lacks the same receptor as its prey;

for the tiger, too, the tiger is green.

So what color is it “really”?

"Extinguish my eyes"

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If you think that is a stupid question, then you have not yet seen the yellow perch through the eyes of its fellow fish.

"Life is colorful" initially shows it from human eyes - as a plain-colored yellow fish.

Different patterns and even different species only become visible in the ultraviolet range, and the yellow perch is no longer yellow afterwards.

It is no different for a rather inconspicuous butterfly, whose radiant beauty is only revealed with the UV camera.

"Extinguish my eyes: I can see you," wrote Rilke.

Butterfly in ultraviolet light

Source: / Netflix

But not everything is poetry, not everything is detail. Arthropods like the fiddler crab view the world in so-called polarized light, which intensifies the contrasts - and not only makes the characteristic waving of the crab, but also the threatening bird in the sky stand out much more sharply. “Life in Color” works for the first time with a corresponding camera, it shows the habitat of the crabs in something like sepia.

Usefulness, not beauty, is the trump card here, but like all signs, colors in nature can ultimately mean anything: "sexy" in courting birds, "fertile" in blushing flamingos, "poisonous" in fingernail-sized frogs, "strong" in lizards , whose male representatives wrap themselves in a red-blue-yellow patchwork costume, or monkeys, whose noses turn sky blue and whose fur turns purple towards the back.

And these are only those color functions that are about being seen and not about not being seen.

Mandrill males become more and more colorful with increasing rank

Source: / Netflix

In fact, a not-so-ambitious animal film would have easily turned the two-hour film (plus appendix) into a four- or six-hour film, and that would not have caused any damage. With the fabulous jumping spider, which changes the color of the flower in which it lurks, you would really have liked to have been a little longer, and the saber-toothed slime fish, which dresses up as a cleaner fish, is hardly at the end of its name has already disappeared again. He has withdrawn into a cave and secretly changes his color there. How much easier it would be to be human if we humans could just do that too.