The Living Desert

The camera goes into the desert of the American southwest and stays there for a year. Lizards, scorpions, rattlesnakes, tortoises, peccaries and hawks, across a cycle of seasons that runs from drought to flood. James Algar directs. It is the first feature length film in Walt Disney's True-Life Adventures series. It won the Oscar for best documentary in 1954 and is the film that brought the nature documentary into cinemas; until then the form had been a short. Its method is contested now. Some scenes are not natural behaviour but constructed situations: an encounter between scorpions is cut to music so that it resembles a dance, some animals are brought into the same frame afterwards, and the narrator assigns human intentions to them. Later generations of nature filmmakers criticised this openly. Against that, the footage itself is real and was extraordinary for its time. The close work with desert animals was obtained through long waiting and was technically well ahead of its period. Who it is for: anyone interested in the history of the nature documentary and in classic Disney production. Who it is not for: the narrator jokes continuously, the music is laid over the animals, and the staged scenes are not reliable as information.