Walt Disney got four Academy Awards for films released in 1953, setting a record for Oscars won by a single person in a single year. One was for the cartoon Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom and all the others were for documentaries: a short portraying The Alaskan Eskimo, a two-reeler called Bear Country, and a feature titled The Living Desert that marked Disney's transition to nonfiction filmmaking on a grand scale.

Disney's studio had begun a series of True-Life Adventures in 1948, winning Oscars for most of them (five out of seven) in the now-defunct category of best two-reel short. Convinced that a feature-length entry would have even more impact, Disney took his cue from a reel of insect footage - detailing a showdown between a beetle and a tarantula - that a UCLA grad student had sent to him.

The result was The Living Desert, a colorful portrait of animals and plants dwelling in arid stretches between the Missouri River and the Sierra Nevada mountains. The terrain looks dead and forbidding but actually pulses with life in a rich variety of forms, ranging from bugs, snakes, and lizards to toads, tortoises, bats, birds, and bobcats. Photographed primarily by entomologist Robert H. Crandall and the aforementioned grad student, N. Paul Kenworthy, Jr., the movie depicts its subjects in the traditional Disney style - revealing and rewarding at its best moments, distortive and manipulative at its worst.

By announcing itself as A True-Life Adventure in the opening credits, The Living Desert links itself with the Oscar-winning shorts made under that rubric. Equally important, it lets audiences know that this big-screen theatrical feature is connected to Disneyland, the brand-new television show launched just two weeks before its 1953 premiere. As connoisseurs of Disney culture know, Disneyland divided its content into four categories - Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, Frontierland, and Adventureland - the last of which presented nature documentaries and was therefore the most firmly grounded in reality. The implicit message to moviegoers was plain: The Living Desert will be an enjoyable entertainment, not a dull educational exercise like the things they show in school.

Be that as it may, this True-Life Adventure doesn't start like a true-life adventure. It begins like a comfortingly familiar Disney cartoon, with an animated pen sketching a bouncy overview of the territory to be explored. The narrator also chimes in, outlining basic facts in friendly yet authoritative tones. A printed text describes the film as a "drama" where "Nature sets the stage and provides the actors," and in line with this description the narrator often ascribes human rationales to nonliving things - calling the desert, for instance, "a country where rivers give up their hopeless struggle and sink into the earth." In this true-life adventure the emphasis is mostly on adventure.

In a clever cinematic strategy, director James Algar eases the transition from animation to live action by following the cartoon prologue with aerial views of exotic vistas that eerily resemble Chesley Bonestell's speculative paintings of landscapes on other planets. Soon after comes a sequence showing how "pent-up gases bubble and boil like seething cauldrons" in the largely dried-up Salton Sea, conveyed through a quick-cutting montage of muddy bubbles, muddy water, and just plain mud, all set to spirited music. This is the first of several times when The Living Desert capitalizes on memories of Fantasia, the 1940 animation that earned Disney and company an honorary Oscar for creativity in sound and music.

The rest of the picture unfolds via live-action photography, but it's important to note that some portions are so conspicuously staged and heavily edited that they construct rather than document their material. Types of fakery as old as Robert J. Flaherty's 1922 classic Nanook of the North boost entertainment value at the expense of authenticity - supposedly natural mouse tunnels with missing walls, for instance, and split-second escapes from predators that the filmmakers clearly arranged. The finale shows a gorgeous array of desert flowers blossoming with the magical speed that only time-lapse cameras can provide, closing the film with live-action footage that's hard to distinguish from the animation that began it.

In terms of subject matter, a wildlife documentary like The Living Desert has to deal with sex and death - not two of Disney's strongest areas, to state the obvious. The narrator alludes to death quite early, saying that the desert embodies "the ancient drama of the struggle for existence, and for the most part, life here is a bit on the grim side." He quickly adds that "there's always comedy relief," and the sight of a hopping roadrunner bears out the point. Still, you can't dance around the fact that desert animals stay alive by eating other desert animals. The film's main response is denial. It displays a fair amount of chasing and stalking, but nothing larger than a millipede gets gobbled on camera, and the confrontations between predator and prey - a rattlesnake and a hawk, for instance - generally end with the latter reaching safety in the nick of time. (An exception is the poor tarantula, which gets paralyzed and carted off by the beetle.)

The film gives more time to sex, or rather to courtship patterns and mating displays, accompanied by the narrator's most brazenly anthropomorphic language and the soundtrack's most shamelessly tricked-up music. The low point comes when the wooing behavior of two scorpions is played as a square dance complete with romping fiddles and calls of "allemande left" and "do sa do." Audiences were willing to swallow this in 1953, but today the average eight-year-old will find it too cutesy for comfort.

Since it raised the stakes of Disney's commitment to documentaries, The Living Desert put added strain on his deteriorating relationship with RKO Pictures, which normally released his productions but didn't like nonfiction. He therefore decided to set up his own Buena Vista Distribution branch, which got off to a running start, parlaying the $300,000 budget of The Living Desert into grosses of $5 million in its initial release. The picture won an international broadcasting award at the Cannes filmfest, where it was shown in competition, and picked up the Berlin festival's gold medal for documentary. It looks less imposing in our own time, but it has great value as a time capsule whisking you back to an era when films geared for family viewing had a self-conscious innocence and willful naivety that have largely vanished from the scene.

Director: James Algar
Producer: Walt Disney
Screenplay: James Algar, Winston Hibler, Ted Sears
Cinematographers: N. Paul Kenworthy, Jr. and Robert H. Crandall
Film Editing: Norman Palmer
Music: Theodore M. Metz
With: Winston Hibler (Narrator)
Color-70m.

by David Sterritt