Disneynature continues its mission to capture the awesome glory of the natural world and package it into consumable story chunks with Oceans, a documentary that overcomes its obvious setbacks to succeed on the visceral power of its images. The film is the second installment of what is intended as an annual Earth Day tradition of Disney-produced celebratory nature docs (2009's Earth was the first; the third is African Cats, due out in 2011). Surely there are conflicting interests at play in series, given that these films that observe and exult our natural surroundings are distributed by one of Hollywood's largest corporate behemoths, and of course the personified representation of land and sea can grow a bit tiresome. At its core, though, Oceans is a film that makes good on its claim of vividly capturing the wonders of the world below sea level.

"To experience the ocean, you have to feel it," intones narrator Pierce Brosnan, and though the statement rings of seminar-level cliché, it most certainly holds true for this film. For 84 minutes, Oceans plunges viewers into the fascinating and gorgeous realm ruled by creatures great and small. Many of them are easily recognizable, others are startling in their oddity, and all are rendered with breathtaking beauty by filmmakers Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, who aim to capture aquatic life with the same illuminating detail as the birds of their Oscar-nominated 2002 opus, Winged Migration. In spite of an over-reliance on the familiar and the tacking-on of Disney-fied storytelling, Oceans does indeed allow viewers to ever-so-briefly "feel" the majesty of the sea.

At its best, Oceans functions as a live-action Fantasia, with its balletic visuals fusing seamlessly with Bruno Coulais' sometimes-stirring, sometimes-soothing orchestral score to create wordless sequences of cinematic joy. The sight of vast schools of fish congregating to form a large, vibrating aqua-planet is visually entrancing, while sequences featuring the predatory rock fish stalking its prey or the mounds of spider crabs crawling all over one another are the most revelatory and entertaining segments in the film. On the other hand, a lengthy focus on sea otters and great white sharks feel like repetitive demonstrations of the ocean's hierarchy, as does the narration's tendency towards personifying the creatures into heroes and villains, though it should be noted that Oceans attempts to keep Brosnan's voice-over limited to a poetic wrap-a-round rather than a center stage element, a la James Earl Jones' full-bodied narration of Earth.

Like most wilderness docs, Oceans faces the dilemma of balancing nature's awe-inspiring beauty with its vicious treachery. To that end, the film chooses to merely scratch the surface of the dangers lurking beneath the surface, though the film's brief glimpses of the raw -- a sequence in which the Great White snatching seals from the water, or the sad trek of baby turtles, the majority of whom are swiped by hungry birds flying overhead before they can reach the safety of the ocean waters -- are disturbing depictions. However, for a substantial portion of its limited running time, Oceans is content to survey the full gamut of oceanic creatures. It is not as wide-reaching in its scope as was Earth, nor is it as keenly focused as African Cats promises to be; rather, it is an overview of life in the waters that cover 70% of the globe. It shows us the ocean, provides a vivid experience of the ocean, and allows us to do that which the narration impresses as so vitally important: feel the ocean.