I also find myself thinking about the lemming, a six-inch-long rodent with pert eyes and a brown-black coat of fur. There are many species of lemmings, and they can be found throughout the colder parts of North America and Eurasia. Most like to be near water, and can swim a fair distance.

Lemmings tend to have an especially extreme population cycle: Every three or four years, their populations explode due to favorable breeding conditions. In the seventeenth century, some naturalists hypothesized that the lemmings must spontaneously generate and then fall from the sky in their millions like raindrops. That belief fell away over time, but another did not. We have long believed that, driven by instinct and/or a willingness to mindlessly follow other lemmings, the creatures self-correct for population growth via mass suicide.

This myth has proven astonishingly durable, even though biologists have known for a very long time that lemmings do no such thing. In fact, lemmings spread out when populations become too large, seeking new and safe spaces. Sometimes, they come to a river or a lake and attempt to cross it. Sometimes, they drown. Sometimes, they die of other causes. In all these respects, they are not too different from other rodents.

But even now, we still sometimes say that people who unquestioningly follow are “lemmings.” We think of lemmings this way in no small part because of the 1958 Disney movie White Wilderness, a nature documentary about the North American arctic. In the film, we watch lemmings migrating after a season of population growth. At last, they come to an oceanside cliff, which the narrator refers to as “the final precipice.”

“Casting themselves bodily out into space,” the narrator tells us, the lemmings hurl themselves over the cliff in their immense stupidity, and those that survive the fall then swim out into the ocean until they drown, “a final rendezvous with destiny, and with death.”

But none of this is a realistic depiction of the lemmings’ natural behavior. For one thing, the subspecies of lemming depicted in the film do not typically migrate. Also, this section of the movie wasn’t even filmed in the wild; the lemmings in question were flown from Hudson Bay to Calgary, where much of the lemming footage was shot. And the lemmings did not hurl themselves bodily out into space. Instead, the filmmakers dumped lemmings over the cliff from a truck and filmed them as they fell, and then eventually drowned. Günter, give them a shove.

Today, White Wilderness is remembered not as a documentary about lemmings, but as a documentary about us, and the lengths we will go to hold on to a lie. My father is a documentary filmmaker (I learned the White Wilderness story from him), and that’s no doubt part of why I love that opening sequence of Penguins of Madagascar.

But I also love it because it captures, and makes the gentlest possible fun of, something about myself I find deeply troubling. Like the adult penguin who stays in line and announces, “I question nothing,” I mostly follow rules. I mostly try to act like everyone else is acting, even as we all approach the precipice. We imagine other animals as being without consciousness, mindlessly following the leader to they-know-not-where, but in that construction, we sometimes forget that we are also animals.