22 Best Nature Documentaries of All Time, Ranked

The canon of films that define the nature documentary genre doesn’t just spectate; they make the world feel both large and small at the same time.

Making the environments these films explore feel familiar and intimate to audiences.  Watch any one of these films, and you'll want to go outside. Watch all of these films, and you'll want to fight for what's out there.

Before we jump into the official ranking, check out the chart below for a brief history on the evolution of nature documentaries.

Evolution of Nature Documentaries • best nature documentaries

The modern-day genre-definer. The BBC Natural History Unit spent 5 years across 62 countries capturing footage of some of nature’s most fascinating creatures in their habitats.

The original Blue Planet marveled at ocean life; the sequel, however, confronted its fragility.

The series that brought Netflix into the nature documentary fold also ushered in Attenborough’s voice into the streaming era. Along with 4K imagery of breathtaking environments and an ecological message woven into every episode, Our Planet proved the genre could sustain its place in film on streaming platforms.

Narrated by the voice of God himself, Morgan Freeman, March of the Penguins captures one of cinema’s most quietly devastating portraits of endurance.

Filmmakers Claude Nuridsany and Maire Pérennou spent three years engineering macro lenses and vibration-dampening rigs to film a single French meadow.

In this thriller movie nature documentary feature, a team of activists, filmmakers, and freedivers exposed the shocking dolphin hunting practices in a remote cove in Japan. 

The thought-provoking investigation that single-handedly changed how we look at SeaWorld. The thriller nature documentary takes a look at the treatment of Tilikum, the theme park’s headlining orca, and the killing of a park employee by him.

In one of the most massive undertakings in nature documentary filmmaking, this feature-length film had a team of over 450 people, including 17 pilots and 14 cinematographers, to capture a variety of birds migrating across 40 countries and all seven continents.

When people say ‘nature documentary,’ they usually refer to wildlife films. Showing animals in the wild, behaving on their own terms, and filmed with devoted patience.

Wildlife documentaries show you animals in their habitats, and through storytelling make you care about a specific one. These picks are some of the best nature documentaries of all time:

Nature Documentary Impact • best nature documentaries

The original Planet Earth showed us the world; Planet Earth II brings us inside it. The sequel wildlife documentary series embraced new technology and a more serious tone, taking us from exploring the planet to becoming intimate with the creatures living in it.

What makes Dynasties stand out from other nature documentary series is its specificity. Each episode is dedicated to a single named animal and follows them across months of filming, allowing the animals to become true characters of the series.

Craig Foster spent a year free-diving in a South African kelp forest, eventually building trust with a wild octopus. What developed from there was the most improbable relationship captured on film.

This lyrical documentary set in a remote and forgotten wilderness of Tanzania captures one of nature's last great mysteries: the birth, life, and death of a million crimson-winged flamingos.

Tracking two big cat families across a single dramatic dry season on the Masai Mara reserve, the wildlife feature-length documentary captures truly stunning footage and brings the animals as characters, bringing us into their world.

Netflix has quietly built one of the strongest nature documentary libraries of all streaming platforms. The range goes from landmark wild series to urgent environmental investigations in true Netflix fashion.

These four titles represent the best of what the platform has to offer.

A unique nature documentary that is less of a memoir and more of a warning. Attenborough takes viewers across the globe from the untouched wilds of his youth to the dramatic changes he's witnessed over his decades of filmmaking.

Using groundbreaking low-light camera technology, the wildlife documentary series lifts night's veil to reveal the hidden lives of the world's creatures.

Filmmakers embedded themselves with undercover operators tracking the illegal ivory trade across Africa and China over sixteen months,  making this documentary operate like an investigative journalism piece.

The best family nature documentaries aren’t set out to talk down to kids, but trust that the wonder of the world being captured doesn’t need to be simplified.

These four films are rated G and built around something children respond to instinctively: a specific animal, a specific journey, and something genuinely at stake.

Disneynature's most ambitious theatrical release follows creatures across every ocean environment: whale sharks, cuttlefish, sea lions, and species that look like they were designed by a fever dream.

Following a grizzly mother named Sky and her two cubs through their first year in the Alaskan wilderness from den emergence through salmon season, Bears feels big and adventurous.

The story of Oscar, a young chimp who loses his mother and is unexpectedly adopted by the group's dominant male, a thing that rarely happens in the wild.

Nature documentaries have always carried a consistent argument: this thing, whether it's an animal, an industry, or an environment, is worth protecting. These five films make that argument explicit.

Each one centers on a specific environmental or conservation issue, builds a documented case, and produces measurable real-world outcomes. Descriptions here reflect the claims and arguments each film makes.

The film follows photographer James Balog's team as they install time-lapse cameras at glaciers across Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska, presenting the resulting footage as visual evidence of climate change occurring at historically unprecedented rates. 

Leonardo DiCaprio, along with a camera team, traveled across multiple countries interviewing scientists, policymakers, and activists about climate change in the lead-up to the 2015 Paris Agreement.

This environmental advocacy documentary argues that large-scale commercial fishing is the primary driver of ocean ecosystem destruction, and challenges the credibility of sustainable seafood certification programs.