Helena Bonham Carter is wild about her new project…

Netflix has hired the 55-year-old part-Spanish–British actress and two-time Oscar nominee to narrate a blue-chip natural history series about the secret world of baby animals in the wild.

Bonham-Carter will reveal the animals’ moving stories in Wild Babies, which comes from UK indie Humble Bee Films and will run to eight episodes. Netflix will launch the show globally on May 5 but has kept it under wraps until now.

The character-driven series will follow 17 animal families across 16 countries, with subjects including lions, wild dogs, sea otters, orangutans, grizzly bears, elephants, bottlenose dolphins and emperor penguins featuring. Their young will be followed from birth through developmental milestones and coming-of-age moments.

Stephen Dunleavy and Charlotte Crosse are executive producers for Humble Bee, which is the Bristol-based producer behind BBC, Netflix and Channel Nine co-production Attenborough’s Life in Colour and Attenborough and the Giant Elephant for the BBC and CBC.

“Wild Babies will resonate with a broad family audience, with heart-warming stories that will feel relatable to viewers around the world,” said Crosse.

“Delivering an ambitious wildlife series during a global pandemic certainly presented new challenges for our team, but what we hadn’t anticipated were the creative opportunities and innovative approaches that also emerged.”

The show marks Netflix’s latest foray into the natural history space. Its biggest bet to date was 2021’s Attenborough-narrated Our Planet, though it has more recently announced a co-production with Sky titled Predators.

Five-time Emmy nominee Bonham Carter narrated last year’s BBC Earth/BBC America series Eden: Untamed Planet, becoming the latest in a line of A-listers narrating natural history docs.