Against Walt Disney’s Corporate Education: Walter Breckenridge’s Nature Films as Scientific Investigation

On September 5, 1952, Ben Sharpsteen of Walt Disney Productions wrote to ornithologist Dr. Walter J. Breckenridge, director of the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1970. Breckenridge was well known for using photographs and films in his scientific expeditions, and Sharpsteen was interested in “obtaining 16mm Kodachrome film of [Breckenridge’s footage of] the Sandhill Crane” for use in Disney’s True-Life Adventure series.¹ This series, by then in its fourth year, consisted of feature-length and short films that compiled and constructed “synthetic stories,” primarily from existing wildlife footage.² It has been described as the most powerful contributor to the codification of wildlife film in America in the 1950s.³ Yet the company’s process of recuperating and recycling footage for its films has not yet been studied in depth, preventing us from considering how the films’ dramatizations of nature have impacted our understanding of the wildlife film as a genre— as well as the economic and ideological motivations that were part of this process of generic construction.

Sharpsteen’s request for footage was standard practice: as Disney representative Wanda Elvin had previously explained to Breckenridge,

as you may know, this series is completely in live-action, color, and the original is 16mm although the release is 35 Techni-color. We have frequently sent photographers out into the field to produce our film, but almost as frequently we have purchased footage from people who specialize in wildlife photography.⁴

This footage, however, was not used in a scientific manner: in Disney’s view, sensationalist effects were more important than objective facts and allowed for a more emotional approach to wildlife filmmaking. Indeed, while the True-Life Adventure films relied on the presumption of objectivity carried within their documentary style, they also used cinematic strategies that brought the audience into a specific narrative. Here humans were replaced by anthropomorphized animals—animals not unlike those in Disney’s more famous animated films (or, in Erik Barnouw’s words, “burlesque humans”).⁵

In this sense, soliciting Breckenridge’s footage of the Sandhill Cranes was less an attempt to gather scientific images than it was an attempt to accumulate illustrations of a specific topic, based in part on their aesthetic appeal.⁶ Nevertheless, for Disney, this practice was sufficient to label the films as nature documentaries, a process of generic construction that relied in part on asking scientists to attest to a scene’s plausibility. In an October 6, 1952, letter, for instance, Breckenridge was asked to confirm that his footage would not be used in ways contradicting the views of the scientific community. As Disney production manager Erwin L. Verity wrote,

one of the problems we experience in the making of our True-Life Adventure films is to make certain that the wildlife incorporated into the film authentically matches the locale of the story. In the case of your Sandhill Cranes, we are considering incorporating these birds into a story of the wildlife of the prairie. Due to the fact that the prairie country has been cut up and changed in character by the inroads of civilization, we have found that the locale of prairie wildlife has also changed. Although we intend to check this point carefully, we would also appreciate an expression from you as to the authenticity of Sandhill Cranes living in prairie country.⁷

Breckenridge’s approval, in short, was sought so that Disney could insert his material within a preestablished story.

Such uses of nature footage had an additional economic logic for Disney, whose entry into wildlife film production in 1948 had been caused in part by the high cost of animation.⁸ Moreover, the extent of the practice eventually led the company to suppress the contributions of figures like Breckenridge. This caused conflict for Breckenridge, as Audio-Visual Educational Service (AVES, established at the University of Minnesota in 1932)—which both supervised Breckenridge’s filmic productions and held their copyrights— required that the University of Minnesota as well as Brecken-ridge be recognized in the film...