Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out by Sean Griffin Page B

the 1940s, the studio was producing a series of documentary shorts (and, by the 1950s, features) under the titles
    “True-Life Adventures” and (in the 1950s) “People and Places.” Unlike the Educational Division, these productions were made for exhibition in major film theatres, and, when Seal Island (1949) turned a sizable profit and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short, the studio quickly turned out more. Just as the studio found that a return to the moral fairy-tale narrative that had begun the studio’s feature film production was more successful than the rampant sexuality in the package films had been, the entertainment-oriented animal documentaries proved more economically viable and popular than the more specifically educational productions.
    The “True-Life Adventures” became immensely popular and were converted to 16 mm for classroom exhibition and edited for episodes of Disney’s television series. Focusing mainly on animal life, audiences warmed to vivid displays of what seemed to be creatures functioning in their normal habitat. Yet, as time went on, many began to notice the liberties the studio was taking with the footage shot by the documentari-ans. Many of the people working on the films had originally worked in animation. James Algar, who had been a sequence director on animated features, went on to direct many of the feature-length films in the True-Life Series. Ben Sharpsteen, who had worked on animated shorts and features during the 1930s and ’40s, served as associate producer and later producer of the True-Life series. Consequently, the True-Life shorts and features often took on the look and feel of Disney animation, particularly Bambi.
    Music was used blatantly to provide commentary on footage, making various animal activities seem like high comedy. One of the most M I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY
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    notorious of these sequences is the “scorpion dance” from the feature film The Living Desert (1954). As the scorpions circle each other, the soundtrack blares a square dance, complete with a humorous dance caller. The studio also effectively used slow motion and reverse motion to get desired effects from the animals, such as ducks slowly slipping on ice and crashing into each other in The Vanishing Prairie (1955). Lastly, although always purporting to be examining animals in the wild, environments were often recreated within the studio’s confines to better control the filming conditions. For example, in The Vanishing Prairie, a large section of the film is devoted to the life of prairie dogs. This is often done by presenting glass walled cutouts of prairie dog burrows—
    the better to see them scamper about underground—without regard to how such conditions might change how the animals act and react.
    Much as the “illusion of life” helps naturalize discourse in Disney animation, labeling these films as documentaries essentializes their representations of sexuality and gender. Through clever editing, manipulative musical cues and especially paternal narration written and voiced by Winston Hibler, the True Life series consistently uses the spectacular footage shot by filmmakers to reinforce hegemonic norms, representing such norms as having their equivalent in “nature.” As Derek Bouse points out in his analysis of Disney’s animal films, Nature . . . emerges as a profoundly moral place, a seat of the kind of
    “values” which are the foundation of families and communities. In nature there are virtuous, brave and resourceful heroes, damsels for them to rescue or to win by their deeds, and villains who always pay the price of their transgressions. There is good and evil, right and wrong, punishment and forgiveness.115
    Bouse concludes his argument quite succinctly: “Culture is ‘naturalized’ in the purest sense: by locating its source in nature.”116
    The Vanishing Prairie, the second full-length feature in this series, offers a perfect example of such