The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [200]
The Milottes learned the hard way that Disney meant what he said about promoting seals. Stubbornly, they continued to include Alaskan fishermen in their film narrative. They tried dealing with the struggles the Aleuts had undergone as serfs under Russian rule in the nineteenth century. Disney had been in Ireland for a while and didn’t oversee the Pribilof project carefully. When he finally looked at a rough cut, he flew off the handle. He wanted more seals! Goddamnit! He wanted film of the seals’ drama that Gabrielson had written about in Wildlife Refuges. Taking direct control of the project, Disney had the Aleuts omitted completely from the film. Accompanied by his eleven-year-old daughter, Sharon, Disney flew to the Pribilofs himself in August 1947. Seals were the stars, not humans. Seeing these Pribilof seals would be a significant memory for millions of kids. Roy Disney, his brother, recalled that Walt wanted to see the seal herds “firsthand” and get a better “idea of Alaska,” so as to make the documentary himself.10
What Disney’s distributor, RKO, didn’t understand about Seal Island, as the documentary was called, was that the creator of Donald Duck and Goofy was an ardent conservationist. Disney was on a mission to help save Alaskan wildlife. However, RKO, standing up to him, simply refused to distribute Seal Island, insisting that without the human drama of Eskimos, hunters, and loggers struggling to survive in Alaska, the movie was sure to be a flop. Incredulous RKO executives asked, “Who wants to watch seals playing house on a bare rock?” Refusing to abandon Seal Island, the determined Disney ended up renting a theater in Pasadena on his own dollar. With a powerful musical score by Jim Algar replacing dialogue, Disney showed his film for one week. This qualified Seal Island for an Academy Award in the category “documentary short subject.” A couple of months later, to the amazement of RKO, it won an Oscar.11
For Disney, the Academy Award was a triumph. He told his brother Roy to take the statue over to RKO and whack the executives “over the head with it.” The award also persuaded RKO to distribute the film, and to concede that frolicking Alaskan seals could indeed be a box office hit. Disney was now eager to showcase Alaskan wolves and polar bears as animals worth saving. A secret to Disney’s success with nature documentaries was the music that accompanied Seal Island and other films such as The Living Desert (1953) and The Vanishing Prairie (1954). Disney, it seemed, was also willing to fabricate the habits of seals, bears, and wolves for entertainment value. “He had found a way,” his biographer Neal Gabler wrote, “to combine entertainment with education.”12 Some critics didn’t mind this. Certainly children loved seeing seals anthropomorphized, goofing around with each other like kids at a playground. But others, including the esteemed film critic Richard Schickel, detected fraud. “The tone of a Disney nature film is nearly always patronizing,” Schickel wrote in The Disney Version. “It is nearly always summoning us to see how very nicely the humble creatures do, considering that they lack our sophistication and know-how.”13
In any case, Seal Island—released in 1948, when Ansel Adams was photographing Alaska’s national parks—was a transformative moment in the conservation movement. Using slow-motion and time-lapse film techniques, Disney allowed moviegoers to see life from an animal’s eyes. As a rule, there were no humans in the True-Life Adventure films. Disney was on a mission to protect wildlife. In 1942 his animated film Bambi: A Life in the Woods—based on a book of 1923 by Felix Salten (pen name of the Hungarian journalist Siegmund Salzmann)—had done more than all of John Muir’s books combined to turn American popular culture against deer hunting. All the woodland animals in Disney’s Bambi—Owl, Thumper (a