The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [201]
Never has a film done more to promote wildlife protection than Disney’s Bambi. Whittaker Chambers had been responsible for translating Salten’s original book from German into English. The seasons of nature, from showers in April to leaves falling in November to ponds freezing in January, are dealt with magically in the animated feature film. The horror of deer being chased by hunters provided Bambi with harrowing moments. Bambi was nominated for three Academy Awards—“Best Sound,” “Best Song,” and “Original Musical Score.” Deep human emotions are touched when Bambi’s mother dies. Affected by the intense music, moviegoers became angry at the snarling dog pack that created havoc in the once idyllic wild animal kingdom. But Raymond J. Brown, editor of Outdoor Life, sent a curt telegram to Walt Disney, furious that law-abiding hunters were being portrayed as “vicious destroyers of game and natural resources.”16
During the coming decades, hunters would object to the “Bambi complex,” “Bambi factor,” and “Bambi syndrome.” But advocates of protecting wildlife, such as the Crislers and the Milottes, approved of the cartoon creatures. Disney had Americanized Bambi as a whitetail for an American audience; in Salten’s novel the characters were roe deer. Deer ecology was an important philosophical premise in the film. To present forest life realistically, Disney had dispatched his artists to Maine’s Baxter State Park for six months. They lived among the animals in order to properly sketch head movements and sleeping patterns.17 The columnist George Reiger of Field and Stream said that, overnight, Disney had turned hunting into a grim endeavor: “once Bambi is raised in status from mere deer to Jesus Whitetail Superstar, man’s hunting of deer becomes a crime comparable to the prosecution of Christ.”18
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Disney also became associated with Lois and Herb Crisler. They were going to help the “save the wolf” movement, which Adolph Murie had long promoted at Mount McKinley, much as the Milottes had helped with the Pribilof Island seals. The Crislers had lived for months at a time in the Olympic Mountains. Herb once spent thirty days in the Olympics without food or a gun; he was hard-core. Together they worked to save the Roosevelt elk, the larger “kings” of the Olympics. By vocation, Herb, a native of Georgia, was a motion picture photographer, and Lois was an English instructor at the University of Washington. (Her master of arts thesis had been on “Santayana’s Definition of Beauty.”19) After the Crislers got married, the Olympics became their living room. Both were excellent skiers. The Crislers’ homestead was Hume’s Ranch, a ranger station on the Elwha River. They were hired by the U.S. government to build isolated fire lookouts and hunting shelters. During the winter of 1942–1943, the Crislers served as Aircraft Warning Service lookouts on Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics. Wherever the Crislers went in the Olympics, they took photographs of the gorgeous backcountry. In the winter—following even the worst snowstorms—the Crislers would go skiing. Eventually they traveled around the country showing home movies and slides of their adventures in Washington state’s high country. To supplement their income, Lois wrote articles about wildlife for the Port Angeles Evening News, the paper of the Olympics region in Washington. She also worked on a memoir, “Gift from the Wilderness” (still unpublished).
The Crislers’ big break came in 1949, when Walt Disney decided to purchase film footage of Roosevelt elk playing in the Olympics for his company’s nationally televised show. The public loved the segment, filmed entirely by Herb Crisler and titled “The Olympic Elk.” Building on that success, Walt Disney Productions