Starring Gordon Pinsent and Patricia Phillips. Rated G. 

We live in such a CGI–cranked world that when real creatures stare us in the face, we can barely believe what we are seeing.

Such is the strange effect of watching Flight of the Butterflies, the new IMAX offering that mixes natural history about monarch butterflies with human story. Striped caterpillars chomp milkweed across a five-storey screen; time-lapse MRI scans reveal the metamorphosis inside a chrysalis; and macrophotography captures the perfectly engineered creature flying a mile above the Earth. Most spectacularly, we get to look high up into the trees of remote peaks north of Mexico City, where millions of the migrating insects hang from tree branches like huge origami sculptures.

Butterflies definitely falls under the category “educational film”, but in children, and most likely adults, too, it reinstills a sense of wonder at the natural world.

The movie flits back and forth between the real-life migration of three generations of monarch butterflies and the story of Canadian zoologist Fred Urquhart. Played by Gordon Pinsent, he heads on a decades-long search to solve the mystery of where monarchs head in the fall and winter months—a quest that involved “citizen scientists” tagging butterflies through the 1950s and sending a team on motorbike through remote regions of Mexico in the ’70s.

The structure jumps around more than a butterfly in a zinnia garden, but the starring critter comes across as a miracle of metamorphosis that no computer-generated-creature-feature director could ever concoct. The main message hits home: there once were a billion of these fascinating insects that gathered in Mexico; now that number has been cut in half by urbanization and agriculture. After seeing this, chances are good you’ll be breaking out the milkweed seeds this spring.