"Alien Planet" is an intriguing look at a postulated "Earth 2" (Discovery Channel)
Alien Planet, a 93-minute Discovery Channel documentary, from 2005, by Evergreen Films, directed by Pierre de Lespinois, is one of the most imaginative animated projections of what an 'Earth II' (remember the 90s series with Antonio Sabato) could look like.
The film presumes that a binary star system 6.5 light years away has a planet Darwin with average surface temperature of 70 degrees F, lower gravity but thicker atmosphere. It has lost its oceans.
I'm not sure how probable all of this is, given knowledge of the immediate neighborhood of our solar system. (If the atmosphere is thick and the temperature relatively cool, why did the oceans evaporate?)
The probe, launched by a master ship Von Braun with a super computer, has three pieces; the first crashes, but 'Leo' (for Da Vinci) and 'Ike' are able to explore the planet, and have the artificial intelligence of four year olds.
Some of the life forms are earth-like, with forests, puffballs and fungus-like organisms, and dinosaur-like predators with sonar, and other herbivores (like the bladderhorns). On this desert planet, is there enough vegetation to support herds of vegetarian animals? It gets more interesting, though. The Texas-sized sea turns out to be a symbiotic eusocial colony of organisms that saves water, and can snatch fliers out of the air. The planet has very large animals, like the 5-story groveback, that has forests growing from its shell-like back, and even has 'electric mushrooms'. There is a seven-story predator that "forages" in the “sea”.
At the end of the film, we meet the 'iosapiens', who are large, look a bit arthropod-like (as in 'Alien'), and have methane-filled bladders for locomotion. There is an exchange of cultures and greetings at the very end.
With Michio Kaku, George Lucas, Curtis Clark (whose voice sounds like mine), Stephen Hawking, Randy Pollock.
It has many interruptions of what sound like commercial breaks edited out, as in a TV series.
A good comparison is National Geographic's Extraterrestrials (2005, 60 minutes), which looks at five fictitious planets, one of which is tidally locked around an M-star