"In bringing Perri to the motion picture screen, we feel we've come up on something quite different in moviemaking. We call it a true-life fantasy, a combination of fact and fiction." - Walt Disney, 1957

Disney had great success in its "True-Life Adventure" documentaries, a series of natural history shorts and features presenting the life cycles of wild animals in their natural habitats with impressive photography, folksy narration, and a sense of humor between the moments of drama and danger. The first in the series, a short film called Seal Island (1948), won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject, and the first two features of the series, The Living Desert (1953) and The Vanishing Prairie (1954), won Oscars for Feature Documentary. Disney had created films that were both educational and popular.

There were fourteen official "True-Life Adventures" but Perri (1957), the twelfth in the series, was something a little different: "A true life fantasy," utilizing live action nature photography to tell a scripted story. According to Disney the wildlife research footage shot for the artists working on Bambi inspired the natural history series and Perri brings it full circle. It's based on a book by Felix Salten, the author of the original Bambi. Named for its main character, a young female squirrel, Perri follows the life of the pine squirrel from birth through young adulthood in a wild forest. Over the course of the film her father is killed drawing a marten way from the nest and, while she is scrambling back home after falling from the tree, her family is killed by predators. There are adorable scenes of mothers teaching their cubs and thrilling sequences of Perri scurrying to escape weasels, hawks, and a particularly dogged pine marten. Perri survives but the natural cycle of life is observed with an acceptance of the hierarchy of predators and prey: "Death is a necessary evil; some die that others may survive," gently explains the narrator.

Winston Hibler, who co-wrote and narrated the films of the series, was promoted to producer for this production and Paul Kenworthy, a naturalist with a doctorate from UCLA and a veteran wildlife photographer whose footage appeared in The Living Desert and The Vanishing Prairie, headed the photography unit of this film. Where the documentaries were put together from footage shot by independent cameramen and teams, this production demanded a coordinated effort. Kenworthy and his team scouted the Uintah Nation Forest in Utah for their location and found a glade in a pine forest around a beaver pond, which they dubbed Wildwood Heart. They set up camp with a variety of 16mm cameras, many of them developed for wildlife photography in Disney's own photographic department, and got to work. Cameras were hidden in blinds, suspended from guide wires, placed in warrens, and elevated on platforms to get tree-top footage. Telephoto lenses were used to observe from afar. The sound recordists worked separately to get the natural sounds of the animals at play and on the hunt.

The team picked their two stars, Perri and Porro, out of the local population of pine squirrels for their spirit, pluck, and playfulness, but they are part of a much bigger eco-system. The film presents the life cycle of all the animals of the glade--beavers, raccoons, ravens, hawks, foxes, and martens, as well as the squirrels--through the seasons. (For the family of bobcats, they had to hike their equipment a couple of miles to their den.) When a forest fire erupted nearby, the camera crew rushed to help the firefighters contain the blaze with a firebreak before they turned their cameras on to film the animals fleeing the disaster. The shoot lasted (on and off) for three years, shooting in all seasons, and resulted in over 200,000 feet of film. Additional winter photography was taken at Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The wildlife footage was not staged but it was edited into a narrative over the long post-production period, where the 200,000 feet of raw footage was shaved down to 8,000 feet. Footage was manipulated for slow motion effects in some scenes, and there is even a hibernation dream sequence, a winter wonderland turned hunting ground where animals all escape their pursuers in a splash of animated snowflakes. A bright, colorful score was composed by Paul Smith (his work was rewarded with an Oscar nomination) and three songs written for the film. In keeping with the storytelling conceit, the seasons are renamed: the first spring is "the time of learning" for the newborn animals of all families and mating season is "a time of togetherness."

The True-Life Adventures ended in 1959 with Jungle Cat but Disney's nature documentaries continued on television on The Wonderful World of Disney (with Hibler continuing to narrate and produce many of them) and the legacy of the True-Life Adventures was revived in 2007 with the release of Earth, the first film under the banner of Disneynature. A new series of natural history documentaries made for family viewing in the theaters and on home video was born.

Sources:
The Disney Films, Leonard Maltin. Crown, 1973.
"Disneyland: Adventure in Wildwood Heart," episode directed by Hamilton Luske. Walt Disney Productions, 1957.
IMDb


By Sean Axmaker