True-Life Adventures | |
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Starring | Winston Hibler (narrator) |
Cinematography | Alfred Milotte (1–3) Norman R. Palmer (2–12) Herb Crisler (3) Lois Crisler (3) |
Edited by | Anthony Gérard (1–11) Norman R. Palmer (2–14) Lloyd L. Richardson (6–9) Jack Astwood (12) |
Music by | Oliver Wallace (1–14) Paul J. Smith (2–12) |
Production company | |
Distributed by | RKO Radio Pictures (1948–1953) Buena Vista Film Distribution Co, Inc. (1953–1960) |
Release date |
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Country | United States |
Language | English |
True-Life Adventures is a series of short and full-length nature documentary films released by Walt Disney Productions between the years 1948 and 1960. [1] The first seven films released were thirty-minute shorts, with the subsequent seven films being full features. The series won eight Academy Awards for the studio, including five for Best Two Reel Live Action Short and three for Best Documentary Feature.
Some of the features were re-edited into educational shorts between 1968 and 1975. The latter year saw the release of The Best of Walt Disney's True-Life Adventures , a compilation film derived from the series.
# | Film name | Type | Date | Educational film |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | On Seal Island (a.k.a. Seal Island) | Two-reel short | December 21, 1948 | |
2 | In Beaver Valley (a.k.a. Beaver Valley) | July 19, 1950 | ||
3 | Nature's Half Acre | July 28, 1951 | ||
4 | The Olympic Elk | February 13, 1952 | ||
5 | Water Birds | June 26, 1952 | ||
6 | Bear Country | February 5, 1953 | ||
7 | Prowlers of the Everglades | July 23, 1953 | ||
8 | The Living Desert | Feature | November 10, 1953 | The following educational films were excerpted from The Living Desert: [2]
|
9 | The Vanishing Prairie | August 17, 1954 | The following educational films were excerpted from The Vanishing Prairie: [3]
| |
10 | The African Lion | September 14, 1955 | The following educational films were excerpted from The African Lion: [3]
| |
11 | Secrets of Life | November 6, 1956 | The following educational films were excerpted from Secrets of Life: [3]
| |
12 | Perri ("A True-Life Fantasy") | August 28, 1957 | ||
13 | White Wilderness | August 12, 1958 | The following educational films were excerpted from White Wilderness: [3]
| |
14 | Jungle Cat | August 10, 1960 | The following educational films were excerpted from Jungle Cat: [2]
| |
Additional educational shorts edited from two or more films were released under a "Nature's Living Album" banner, including: [2] [3]
On October 8, 1975, Disney theatrically released The Best of Walt Disney's True-Life Adventures , a full-length documentary film derived from 13 True-Life Adventures films. It was written and directed by James Algar and narrated by Winston Hibler.
The films were among the earliest production experience for Roy E. Disney. This series was the launching pad for Disney's then-new distributor, the Buena Vista Film Distribution Company, Inc. Interstitial animated segments are included, and some filmed sequences are set to music. Ub Iwerks blew up the 16 mm film to 35 mm for theatrical projection and provided some special effects. [5]
The series won eight Academy Awards for the studio including five Best Two Reel Live Action Short awards for Seal Island , In Beaver Valley , Nature's Half Acre , Water Birds , and Bear Country , and three Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature awards for The Living Desert , The Vanishing Prairie and White Wilderness .
Television episodes from Disney's anthology TV series focus on the films, and it inspired a daily panel comic strip that was distributed from 1955 to 1973 and drawn by George Wheeler. [6] Several of the films were adapted in comic book format as one-shots in Dell Comics' Four Color series.
All of the True-Life Adventures have been released on 4 double-DVD sets as part of the Walt Disney Legacy Collection, which launched December 5, 2006.
Disc 1
Disc 2
Bonus Features
Disc 1
Disc 2
Bonus features
Disc 1
Disc 2
Bonus features
Disc 1
Disc 2
Bonus Features
Many of the films are hosted on Disney's streaming platform Disney+, [7] although as of March 2022, some had not yet been added to the service in the United States, including Seal Island and White Wilderness. [8]
Although critics denounced the series' anthropomorphizing of animals, educators honored the True-Life Adventures films. In 1954, the professional teacher organization Phi Delta Kappa International awarded Walt Disney its Education Award, and the National Education Association honored him with the American Education Award. [9]
Animators from Walt Disney Productions used film from the series as reference material for a wide range of animals. [10] During the production of The Rescuers (1977), animator Ollie Johnston cited footage from the series—showing the clumsiness of albatross take-offs and landings—as inspiration for the mice's mode of transportation in the movie. [11]
A 1982 Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary titled Cruel Camera interviews a cameraman who worked on the series, who said he disliked the inaccuracy of the narration. In a notorious example he discussed, the lemmings' mass suicide in White Wilderness was staged, with the same small group of lemmings repeatedly shoved off a cliffside—rather than hundreds intentionally jumping as stated by the narrator—into Alberta's Bow River, rather than the Arctic Ocean as is depicted. [12] In 2003, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game discussed the lemming-suicide myth and in 2022, business magnate Elon Musk referred to the story after calling for Mickey Mouse to be released into the public domain, tweeting: "Ironic that Disney would disparage an entire class of rodents when their main character is a rodent –jealous maybe?" [13]
In 2007, Disney established a new nature film label called Disneynature, which produces feature films similar to the True-Life Adventures series. [14] In March 2019, Disney acquired 21st Century Fox, including the nature-themed National Geographic Films.
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is an animated cartoon character created in 1927 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks for Universal Pictures. He starred in several animated short films released to theaters from 1927 to 1938. Twenty-seven animated Oswald shorts were produced at the Walt Disney Studio. After Universal took control of Oswald's character in 1928, Disney created a new character similar in appearance to Oswald as a replacement: Mickey Mouse, who went on to become one of the most famous cartoon characters in the world.
The Alice Comedies are a series of live-action animated shorts created by Walt Disney in the 1920s, in which a live action little girl named Alice and an animated cat named Julius have adventures in an animated landscape. The shorts were the first work by what ultimately became The Walt Disney Company.
The Living Desert is a 1953 American nature documentary film that shows the everyday lives of the animals of the desert of the Southwestern United States. The film was written by James Algar, Winston Hibler, Jack Moffitt (uncredited) and Ted Sears. It was directed by Algar, with Hibler as the narrator and was filmed in Tucson, Arizona. The film won the 1953 Oscar for Best Documentary.
White Wilderness is a 1958 nature documentary film produced by Walt Disney Productions as part of its True-Life Adventure series. It is noted for its propagation of the myth of lemming mass suicide.
Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS), sometimes shortened to Disney Animation, is an American animation studio that creates animated features and short films for The Walt Disney Company. The studio's current production logo features a scene from its first synchronized sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928). Founded on October 16, 1923, by brothers Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney after the closure of Laugh-O-Gram Studio, it is the longest-running animation studio in the world. It is currently organized as a division of Walt Disney Studios and is headquartered at the Roy E. Disney Animation Building at the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank, California. Since its foundation, the studio has produced 63 feature films, with its first release being Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which is also the first hand drawn animated feature film, and its most recent release was Moana 2 (2024). The studio has also produced hundreds of short films.
Aladdin: The Series is an American animated television series produced by Walt Disney Television Animation that aired from February 6, 1994, to November 25, 1995, concluding exactly three years to the day from the release of the original Disney's 1992 animated feature film of the same name on which it was based. Despite the animated television series premiering four months before the first sequel, the direct-to-video film The Return of Jafar, it takes place afterward. The second and final animated sequel was the 1996 direct-to-video film, Aladdin and the King of Thieves.
Donald in Mathmagic Land is an American live-action animated featurette produced by Walt Disney Productions and featuring Donald Duck. The short was directed by Hamilton Luske and was released on June 26, 1959. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary at the 32nd Academy Awards, and became a widely viewed educational film in American schools of the 1960s and beyond.
A nature documentary or wildlife documentary is a genre of documentary film or series about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures. Nature documentaries usually concentrate on video taken in the subject's natural habitat, but often including footage of trained and captive animals, too. Sometimes they are about wildlife or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series which is distributed across the world.
"Man in Space" is an episode of the American television series Disneyland which originally aired March 9, 1955 on ABC. It was directed by Disney animator Ward Kimball. This Disneyland episode, was narrated partly by Kimball and also by such scientists Willy Ley, Heinz Haber, and Wernher von Braun, as well as Dick Tufeld of Lost in Space fame.
Parade of the Award Nominees is an animated short which was made for the 1932 banquet for the 5th Academy Awards, featuring Mickey Mouse and his friends leading a parade of caricatured Hollywood stars.
Perri is a 1957 American adventure film from Walt Disney Productions, based on Felix Salten's 1938 novel Perri: The Youth of a Squirrel. It was the company's fifth feature entry in their True-Life Adventures series, and the only one to be labeled a True-Life Fantasy. In doing so, the Disney team combined the documentary aspects of earlier efforts with fictional scenarios and characters.
Disneynature is an independent film studio that specializes in the production of nature documentary films for Walt Disney Studios, a division of Disney Entertainment, which is owned by The Walt Disney Company. The production company was founded on April 21, 2008, and is headquartered in Paris, France.
Seal Island is a 1948 American documentary film directed by James Algar. Produced by Walt Disney, it was the first installment of the True-Life Adventures series of nature documentaries. It won an Oscar in 1949 for Best Short Subject (Two-Reel).
James Algar was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He worked at Walt Disney Productions for 43 years and received the Disney Legends award in 1998. He was born in Modesto, California and died in Carmel, California.
Winston Murray Hunt Hibler was an American screenwriter, film producer, director and narrator associated with Walt Disney Studios.
The Lion King is a Disney media franchise comprising a film series and additional media. The success of animated original 1994 American feature film, The Lion King, directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, led to a direct-to-video sequel and prequel, a live-action remake in 2019, a prequel/sequel to the 2019 film, a television film sequel, two spin-off television series, three educational shorts, several video games, merchandise, and the third-longest-running musical in Broadway history, which garnered six Tony Awards including Best Musical. The franchise is one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time. The franchise as a whole has EGOT-ed, meaning it has won the four biggest awards of American show business.
People & Places is a series of short subject documentary films released by Walt Disney Productions from 1953 to 1960 and was later revived in 2024. The original series was filmed in CinemaScope in various locations around the world.
Norman "Stormy" Palmer was an American film editor for The Walt Disney Company. He worked for Disney for around 45 years and served as a mentor to Roy E. Disney, who was later appointed vice-chairman of Disney productions. Palmer was best known for his work on the True-Life Adventures series, and in 1998 he was named a Disney Legend.
The Best of Walt Disney's True-Life Adventures is an American compilation documentary film produced by Walt Disney Productions, directed by James Algar and released by Buena Vista Distribution on October 8, 1975. The film is composed of highlights from the Academy Award winning True-Life Adventures series of 13 feature length and short subject nature documentary films produced between 1948 and 1960.
The Olympic Elk is a 1952 American short documentary film directed by James Algar and produced by Walt Disney as part of the True-Life Adventures series of nature documentaries.