Thus, in this random documentation of the fauna that still may be found in certain parts of the great American prairie lying east of the Continental Divide, they have mixed such sober observation as that brief shot of the birth of a buffalo with such trickery as a metronomic montage of mountain rams banging their heads together in time to ‘The Anvil Chorus’ … They simply desire to shape and order nature so that it will captivate and amuse.ĭespite the intended family friendly appeal and their award-winning streak, the series wasn’t without controversy. Sometimes it is willfully angled or distorted for the sake of a gag. hold up a mirror to nature, but the mirror isn’t always flat and clear. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther hardly distinguished between Disney’s documentaries and its animated work, writing that “the Disney boys are as playful with nature pictures as they are with cartoons.” He’d go further in his review of The Living Desert : The True-Life Adventures films are not especially different from the Disney films that had come before, with Bambi as a clear narrative template. Disney would keep diversifying beyond animation, eventually becoming the behemoth we know today. The Living Desert went on to win the Best Documentary Oscar that year and surpass Gone With the Wind to become the highest-grossing film ever in Japan at the time. After RKO refused to distribute the first feature-length True-Life Adventures doc, 1953’s The Living Desert, the companies went their separate ways, and it became the first film released under Disney’s new banner Buena Vista Distribution. In an unexpected way, documentary filmmaking laid the groundwork for the Magic Kingdom’s monopolistic stranglehold on contemporary media. An obviously biased article by a Disney historian sees Walt Disney’s desire to make nature documentaries as humanitarian in nature, motivated by his concern for a “vanishing frontier.” The film’s distribution was handled by RKO, which initially balked at the idea of putting a nature documentary in theaters - they only caved to a national release after it won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject, the first of many for the series. In the postwar period, Disney was nowhere near the monolith it is today. (Later in his career, he’d write the script for Disneyland’s uncanny animatronic Abraham Lincoln.) The first installment in the series was the 1948 short film Seal Island. Almost all of the True-Life Adventures films were helmed by James Algar, a Disney animator best-known for the iconic Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment of Fantasia. White Wilderness was an installment in the True-Life Adventures series, Disney’s first foray into nonfiction filmmaking and the precursor to Disneynature, its modern-day subsidiary which produces films like African Cats and Born in China. This was likely because of a lack of interest in an old nature documentary, but it also dovetails nicely with Disney’s self-censoring impulse. Though White Wilderness was on Disney+ at launch, the look at Arctic life was removed at the beginning of the year, along with a handful of other titles. It’s not the most inflammatory film in the company’s catalog, but it’s still an ethically thorny landmark. But if the film that gave us “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” is Disney’s Birth of a Nation, then the Oscar-winning 1958 nature documentary White Wilderness is its Nanook of the North.
Unsurprising but particularly glaring was the omission of 1946’s Song of the South, Disney’s racist adaptation of the Uncle Remus stories. The House of Mouse now owns the rights to an unfathomable amount of content, which makes what’s not available on Disney+ as glaringly apparent as what is. The family-oriented platform offers a spotless selection of good, clean classics from the studio’s vault, along with non-Disney titles that also conform to its warm, wholesome image, like The Sound of Music and Home Alone. If you’ve browsed the film selection on Disney+, it’s clear that the streaming service was curated to project a very specific image. Promotional image for White Wilderness (courtesy Disney)
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