July 19 - True-Life Adventures

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On this day, in 1950, In Beaver Valley, the second film in the True-Life Adventures series, was released to theaters. The Walt Disney Studio's first foray into the genre of nature films was actually animated. During production on Bambi, countless live animals were brought in for animators to sketch, numerous lectures were given on topics like what happens to a forest following a major fire, and the characters were depicted much closer to reality than animation usually chose to portray them. Notice that none of the animals are wearing clothes, for instance. Walt's interest in the natural world, while it slipped to the background for several years, endured.

In the late Forties, Walt's personal concern about the vanishing frontier prompted him to hire Alfred and Elma Millote, a husband and wife team who owned a camera shop in Alaska, to begin documenting anything and everything in the wilds of their state. They filmed Eskimos, bears, small town businesses, caribou, you name it (when the boss basically gives you carte blanche on a project, you don't ask questions). Walt and his team sifted through hours of seemingly unrelated footage and zeroed in on the antics of some seals. He asked the Millotes to get more footage of seals, turned everything over to the Legendary James Algar and told him to make something out of it. The result was a 27 minute film called Seal Island.

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Walt took Seal Island to RKO Pictures, the studio's distribution company at the time, to schedule a release date. RKO declined to accept the offer saying that no one was going to be willing to sit through a 27 minute nature film. Walt left RKO's offices, visited a friend of his who ran the Crown Theater in Pasadena and convinced him to show Seal Island for a week in December. That showing allowed the picture to qualify for the Academy Awards the following year. When the envelope was opened for Best Documentary Short, the winner was... Seal Island. Supposedly, the day after the Oscar ceremony, Walt told his brother, Roy, to take the golden statuette down to RKO's offices and "beat them over the head" with it. There's no coincidence in the fact that Walt started his own distribution company shortly thereafter. He'd been growing increasingly dissatisfied with RKO and their initial refusal of what turned into the True-Life Adventure series was the last straw.

Buoyed by the success of Seal Island, Walt had the Millotes gather more footage which was again turned over to James Algar. The subject of the second film was beavers and resulted in the 32 minute film In Beaver Valley. It, too, won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. The formula was perfected and proven to be commercially viable. Over the course of a dozen years, Disney would release 14 True-Life Adventures, seven shorts and seven features, winning a total of eight Oscars, five for the shorts and three for the features. In addition to being successful in its own right, the series was also a valuable training ground for an up and coming producer name Roy E. Disney, spawned a daily comic strip that ran for eighteen years starting in 1955 and inspired countless young people to get into the conservation of nature.

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Not that the True-Life Adventures didn't create some controversy along the way. Some of it was silly, like the objection to putting Tango music behind the mating dance of tarantulas or playing the Anvil Chorus while bighorn sheep locked horns. Walt wasn't trying to make dry scientific movies. He was trying to present nature to an audience that needed to anthropomorphize their subjects in order to even begin to care. Which isn't to say that all of the objections were unfounded. For the 1958 feature White Wilderness, a film crew transported lemmings from Manitoba to Alberta in Canada, filmed them until they got the footage they wanted and then herded them off a cliff into a lake to film their "suicidal tendencies." There's a reason no one had ever filmed lemmings doing that before. They don't do that unless forced to. It is important to note that no one at Disney ever asked the film crew to do anything like that, but apparently no one questioned the footage afterwards either.

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The last True-Life Adventure was the 1960 feature, Jungle Cat. The studio continued to make films featuring live animals after that but they were based on fictional stories like Perri, based on a tale by Bambi author Felix Salten, and Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar. The True-Life Adventures did gain a second life, though. Excerpts were taken from them and presented to schools as short nature films for the classroom. I particularly remember seeing the ones distilled from The Living Desert.  And they have inspired a new series that exists today, albeit with more scientific rigor applied to them, the Disneynature films.