Microcosmos simply shows us what could exist near someone's backyard--all of the creatures which exist on a microscale. Where a season is a lifetime, where a day is a month, and where raindrops are monstrous cannonballs. Such is their scale to time and daily occurrences.

It's one thing to see a documentary compressed to your TV screen, it's quite another to have these creatures billboard size in front of you. At this viewing scale, a butterfly's wings become abstract canvases which put Jackson Pollock to shame. Even the lowly caterpillar's pigmentation takes on aesthetics when filling the screen. A preying mantis has evolved to such an exent that it utterly matches its environment of dried thistle--the insect is just as dried out and varigeated as the plants themselves. There is no mantis, just thistle which kills and eats other insects.

The documentary is mercifully free from redundant narration--the annoying habit of describing what is happening in front of us as if we are too stupid to figure it out for ourselves. ("As the sun sets over the ocean, we say aloha...") Matter of fact, it's a little too spare, and what narration occurs is of a New Age variety. The sequence of the ladybugs eating aphids and stopped by the ants which proceeded to milk the aphids is an example where a little narration could've gone a long way.

Scenes are photographed so startingly up close that they become less than/more than insects: