What's going on
Umigatari is a city-run aquarium in Joetsu, a town on the Sea of Japan coast in Niigata Prefecture. Its signature residents are Magellanic penguins, and there are a lot of them — over a hundred, the largest group of that species kept anywhere in the country. Moving that many birds from one area to another is a routine part of the day, and the birds do it at whatever pace they feel like.
The clip in question is one of those moves. The aquarium posted it from its own account with a caption that isn't really a sentence — just a single word, held and stretched across some forty characters, roughly the effect of yelling GOOOOO until you run out of air. What follows is a walkway full of penguins coming straight at the camera. Some sprint. One trips. One reaches the edge of the water, appears to reconsider the entire plan, and stops.
The reactions run about as you'd expect, with one recurring theme: a surprising number of people watched this and immediately wanted to lie down in the middle of it.
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My take
Comments loosely translated for tone. Reactions collected from Togetter and X threads.
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The original caption is one word — ike, “go” — stretched across about forty characters. Japanese holds a consonant by repeating a small ッ, so the shout catches in the throat several times over before it finally breaks loose into a long vowel and a wall of exclamation marks. It reads less like a word than like someone losing their voice in real time.
Nagashi penguin is a riff on nagashi sōmen, a summer thing where thin noodles are sent sliding down a split bamboo flume and you catch them with chopsticks as they go by. The joke is that the penguins are being served the same way.