SUPER OCEAN WEEKEND

In this French import, four young animal vacationers learn about the world ocean and many of its marvelous residents.

With Echid, a spiny relative visiting from Australia, serving as the main lecturer, the Science Adventure Club camps out on a tiny island for a weekend of banter and learning. They offer infodumps on oceans, tides, and wave types, the water cycle, climate change, and primeval life and the “Biological Big Bang” 500 million years ago that led to more complex organisms from seaweed and corals to blobfish and blue whales. Aside from debatable claims that humans are the oceans’ “biggest predators” and the “only beings on the planet that produce waste” (both of which may be translation issues), Alméras lays out a solid but easily digestible informational load in unframed, pale-hued, free-form panels that flow along, effortlessly drawing young naturalists (and viewers) from polar surface to hadalpelagic zones. The oceanic expedition fetches up at last back on the beach where it started. One of the friends notes that by 2050, floating plastic will “take up as much space as animals do in the ocean,” which serves as a spur for the author’s ensuing plea to get involved in cleanup and zero-waste causes.

A series of quick but thoroughly immersive dives.