This year will see the first films released by Disneynature, making good on Mickey’s New Year’s resolution to produce two nature documentaries annually for the foreseeable future. Reports on the endeavor (including the National Reviews’ always hilarious Planet Gore blog) portray it as novel. Yet, in its own press release, Disney speaks of “balancing heritage and innovation,” as Disneynature is a resurrection and rebranding of what the studio sold sixty years ago as “True-Life Adventures.”

Then as now, Disney’s motives are financial. Its early animated features (those without the iconic princesses) hemorrhaged money. Time consuming and labor intensive, they sent the studio’s producers looking for some way to balance the books. They tried propaganda for the military and industrial films for Detroit. And then in 1948 they landed on Seal Island. A fanciful trip to Alaska’s Pribilof Islands, which in mating season (according to Roy Disney himself) “looks like Coney Island on the Fourth of July,” the documentary cost a fraction of Bambi to make, raked in more money, and won an Oscar to boot. Eleven additional nature films would follow in the next twelve years, as the series begot the studio’s own distribution apparatus, Buena Vista, and raised its profile on primetime television. Today, as a recent restructuring has cut Disney’s annual production schedule in half and its first-quarter profits are down by 33%, it’s no wonder Chief Executive Robert Iger revealed to the New York Times his envy of March of the Penguins, the $3 million shoestring Warner Brothers used to lasso $127 million at the box office. The shining knights have been dispatched from Cinderella’s castle to try once again to, as Gregg Mitman’s writes, “mine the frontier of nature.”

Mitman takes us through the fascinating history of the “True-Life Adventures” in his Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Though Walt Disney liked to say that “nature wrote the screenplays,” (more…)