I saw the documentary "Winged Migration" on DVD, and it got me to thinking a lot about magic and how breathtaking, uplifting miracles can become so disappointing (and worse than that -- actually negative, or an experience of spiritual diminishment) when one discovers the secret of how the trick works.  If you've seen the film, you know what truly magical moments were caught on camera.  Most of the scenes seem "impossible," so extraordinary are they.  I wasn't so much asking "how did they do it?" (because I knew they must have been in airplanes and holding cameras!), but more "how could they possibly have captured so many rare, once-in-a-lifetime occurrences?")  It was one of the most striking movie experiences of my life, and I have seen a lot of films (well-over three thousand films over the last decade alone).  Alas, I began watching the "making of" featurette on the DVD, and I was totally devastated.  The "secret" of the filmmakers was far more diabolical than I could have possibly imagined.  All of the magic drained away, and I was left feeling tricked (the bad kind of tricked -- as in swindled by con-men).  When a magician does something miraculous on stage, you've paid to be entertained and you delight in being fooled.  When a documentary filmmaker dupes you, it's a whole different story.  I found myself feeling outraged over and over again as I learned about the astonishingly elaborate methods the filmmakers employed to secure their footage (though they didn't put strings on the birds' claws and fly them like kites, such a method wasn't beneath them).  I actually had to shut off the DVD player after the worst revelation -- they crated up the pelicans and flew them in an airplane to Africa so as to record that leg of the birds' migratory "journey."  I would have far more enjoyed watching a cartoon about birds, or a LucasArts digital rendering of birds, because neither would have pretended to be a legitimate documentary.  Of course, it all boils down to packaging, doesn't it?  Had the sham-documentary filmmakers stated upfront that this film was an artistic depiction of how birds fly, and explained that all the birds in the film were actors (which is actually quite true, as the birds had been raised and imprinted by the filmmakers from eggs, then trained to fly on cue alongside the aircraft and to follow the sound of the squeeze horn), then I probably would have been quite amazed and delighted by so elaborate an endeavor!  As it was, they presented a fantastic illusion, then turned around and showed how they did it, leaving the viewer feeling gullible.  Had they been real wonder-workers instead of con-artists, they would have left the viewer feeling amazed, not duped.