History: Walt Disney’s 'Living Desert' still resonates and inspires

The film was the result of “patient stalking” in the desert, requiring some 200,000 feet of film to be shot and then edited. The speculation about the methods of making of Walt Disney’s “The Living Desert” began almost immediately after its release. The film was Disney’s first feature-length “True-Life Adventure” and was a box-office sensation and won numerous honors, including the Academy Award for Best Documentary for 1953.

The film grossed more than “Gone With the Wind” in Japan, won the International Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1954, an award at the Berlin Film Festival and received a special achievement award at the Golden Globes.

The movie delighted children and their parents and served as the definitive introduction to the desert for generations. Shot mostly in Arizona’s Monument Valley, the film wouldn’t be considered a documentary by today’s standards.

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times reviewed its opening: “Here, in this handsome color picture, the frame of reference of the Disney camera men is the great arid plain that stretched from Oregon to Mexico, in the lee of the weather-barrier the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges impose. And the objects of their observations are the manifold varieties and forms of wild life that dwell in the area and are seldom seen by the eye of man.”

The close-up shots of kangaroo rats, rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions, toads, centipedes, wasps and beetles are set to music and devised into an anthropomorphized narrative that is less than scientific.

Crowther continued: “Indeed, if there is a sense of surfeit to be felt as the picture goes along, it is because of the sameness of the mortal conflicts that occur in the varying scenes. Individually, the fights and depredations that go on among the desert denizens are fascinating and exciting…but the repetition of the incidents of violence and death eventually tends to stun the keyed-up senses.”

One other contemporary account speculated that the filmmakers hadn’t just been fortunate in what they captured on film. “A more likely theory is that our pictorial geniuses picked themselves a nice, cozy piece of desert, not too far from town, and built a small animal enclosure carefully ‘wired’ with concealed cameras.”

And that is likely the way some of the scenes were obtained. Despite inquiries, “The company that made the film may be keen to reveal to us the secrets of Mother Nature, but apparently are not so anxious to reveal the secrets of Father Disney.”

Crowther agreed: “There is another weakness of the Disney boys evidenced in the film. The general public will not object to it, but the studious naturalists may. That is their playful disposition to edit and arrange certain scenes so that it appears the wild life in them is behaving in human and civilized ways.”

The film was deeply personal to Disney. Despite the high-brow criticisms, the film was commercially successful. Disney loved the desert, lived here and wanted to share his delight with the world. He had been a fixture in the desert since the 1920s; he played polo, went on horseback trail rides and was involved in the community. He participated in the Desert Circus, bringing the Disneyland stage to the desert to ferry children in the parade. He socialized with locals involved in business and architecture. He felt invigorated by the natural environment, and the film would pay homage to his profound appreciation for all aspects of the glorious natural desert.

Crowther acknowledged: “Mr. Disney’s earnest people have done a remarkable job of collecting some extraordinary footage and his editors have assembled it well for excitement and fascination, more than for education.”

Inspired by 10 minutes of footage shot by N. Paul Kenworthy, a doctoral student at UCLA, Kenworthy's footage of a battle between a tarantula and wasp intrigued Disney, who decided to expand the concept, funding the feature-length production and reportedly saying, “This is where we can tell a real, sustained story for the first time in these nature pictures.”

Augmenting the contrived animal sequences, gorgeous desert skies in sunset, time-lapsed blossoming of cacti and the rain-soaked terrain producing flash floods were the genuine article, if less interesting to children than the critters and their life and death struggles. Two scenes, in particular, were authentic and worthy of all the accolades.

The first features a bobcat interacting with a pack of peccaries and having to scale a huge saguaro cactus to avoid being gored. The cat’s climb to terrifying heights is as remarkable to watch as it is to have been captured on film and results in a truly remarkable picture of the cat balancing atop the cactus.

The second is a long sequence featuring the desert tortoise. The ancient creatures are emblematic of the desert itself. The filmmakers capture two males in battle, ostensibly over a female. The drama is life-threating and captivating.

The film resonated in the Coachella Valley in ways that Disney himself would no doubt applaud. In 1970, a group of trustees of the Desert Museum took the “Living Desert” name for a nature trail and preserve in Palm Desert in order to cultivate appreciation and mitigate the impact that resort development would have on the desert ecosystem. The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens has evolved and expanded ever since.

Appropriately, Boy Scouts helped clear the inaugural three-mile nature trail; 1,000 acres of untouched desert were preserved in their natural state, and the diversity of desert plants was celebrated with a botanical program. These days hundreds of thousands of visitors walk the grounds each year learning about flora and fauna adapted to the extreme environment. The “Living Desert” name is now associated with the preserve more than the movie that helped inspire it.

Similarly inspiring, the Desert Tortoise Preserve Committee was established in 1974 led by Ron Berger “to promote the welfare of the Desert Tortoise in its native wild state in the southwestern U.S., to establish one or more preserves where habitats and ecosystems will support it and to provide and disseminate information, education and research regarding ecosystems critical to the Desert Tortoise and associated plant and animal species.” Dozens of other organizations are also working to protect the desert tortoise and its habitat. (Learn more at tortoise-tracks.org.)

Desert development has far exceeded the wildest of imaginations in the ensuing decades. The Coachella Valley has grown exponentially, making the notion of conservation more urgent. Interestingly, Disney’s company is back in the desert, specifically Rancho Mirage, with a new housing development that has recently been in the news. Those working on the project are unavoidably aware of the reverence Disney himself had for the desert and his distinct desert legacy as they are writing the next chapter in the “Living Desert” story.

Tracy Conrad is president of the Palm Springs Historical Society. The Thanks for the Memories column appears Sundays in The Desert Sun. Write to her at pshstracy@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Palm Springs history: Walt Disney’s 'Living Desert' still resonates