The first in these installments was Seal Island (1948), a short that Disney commissioned after viewing thousands of feet of footage shot in Alaska on its nature and culture. He didn't find the human society stuff interesting but the animal footage intrigued him. He assigned James Algar to direct it and when all was said and done, it proved not only commercially and critically successful, it won the Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short Subject. It took only a few more years before Disney decided to up the ante from shorts and move to feature length, just as he had done with animation. In 1953, he released the feature-length The Living Desert, and to no one's surprise, it succeeded, winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary. The next year brought the series its most famous, and greatest installment, The Vanishing Prairie. It won the Oscar, too, but more importantly, established the nature documentary as a viable commercial enterprise, becoming a lasting hit in the Disney canon.
The Vanishing Prairie gives the viewer a glimpse into the natural world that exists between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Starting out with the advent of Spring and the return of migratory birds, the viewer sees both the majestic, as Whooping Cranes dance in the sky, and the comical, as Mallards come in for landings on iced over ponds and, sliding across the ice, crash into each other with reckless abandon. We also see buffalo roaming the plains, coyotes attacking snakes, and mountain lion cubs chasing squirrels in trees. But there's also a fair amount of heart-pounding footage, as a fawn narrowly escapes death at the hands (or should that be paws) of a hungry cougar, or prairie dogs escape the flooding of their tunnels, or a jack rabbit escapes advancing grass fire by running straight through it. As the documentary ends, we're back at winter as the cycle starts over, moving towards another spring.
The Vanishing Prairie was, quite surprisingly, not free of controversy. One of its greatest moments, the birth of a buffalo, was the subject of a ban in New York State of all places. The censor board there thought that such an image might upset viewers. Wiser heads prevailed and the ban was lifted, leaving Bosley Crowther to write in The New York Times, referring to the film's already apparent enduring qualities, "[n]ow that the New York State censor has agreed that a film may show a buffalo's birth without tending to corrupt morals or incite to crime, 'The Vanishing Prairie' of Walt Disney should be very much in evidence for some time on the unhindered screen of the Fine Arts."
The film was directed by James Algar, a director Disney came to trust early on. At the young age of 28, Algar, already working at Disney studios, was tapped to direct the Mickey Mouse segment of Fantasia, the famous Sorcerer's Apprentice sequence. From there, it only got better. He was enlisted by Disney time and time again to direct animated shorts (The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, 1949), live-action shorts, many episodes of Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color, as well as nearly every installment of the True Life Adventure Series, including its multiple Oscar winners. In The Vanishing Prairie, as with the others, Algar employed non-documentary footage in a way as to blend in with the actual footage shot, something documentary filmmakers have been doing from the beginning but which has led to criticism of the genre. For instance, to show the dangers of a prairie fire, and get the best possible camera setups, they had to setup grass fires they could film and show artificially constructed prairie dog tunnels (viewed from the side of a glass encased tunnel) filling with smoke to show what's happening beneath the plain.
The Vanishing Prairie would be so successful it would be broken up into its constituent parts (the buffalo herds, the prairie dogs, etc.) and marketed as individual educational shorts, often shown on Disney for years to come. Today, it still holds up as great nature documentary giving the viewer, with breathtaking scenery and fascinating footage, both education and entertainment.
by Greg Ferrara
