Ben Sharpsteen Movies

The Best of Walt Disney's True-Life Adventures assembles the cream of Disney's "live action" short subjects crop. Since Disney usually equated "best" with what won at Academy Award time, this collection highlights the studio's Oscar-winning nature shorts. We are thus treated to the first of the "True Life Adventures" series, 1949's Seal Island, filmed in Alaska by nonprofessionals Alfred and Elma Milotte. Others in this compendium include Beaver Valley (1950), Nature's Half Acre (1951) and Water Birds (1952). The feature-length True-Life Adventures of the mid-1950s and 1960s have been packaged for video on a title-by-title basis. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The first portion of this Walt Disney Presents episode is a behind-the-scenes preview of the upcoming Disney theatrical feature Swiss Family Robinson. Hosted by three of the film's stars, John Mills, Dorothy McGuire and Janet Munro, the segment details the difficulties encountered by the production crew while filming on location in the West Indies' island of Tobago -- an island so uninhabited that even the animals had to be shipped in from the States. The second half of the episode consists of the Oscar-winning "True Life Adventure" short subject Water Birds, previously telecast as part of the Disneyland installment "A Trip Through Adventureland and Water Birds." ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

This Disney "True-Life Adventure" was filmed on location in the Arctic. Covering the period from the Spring thaw to the winter freeze, the film offers rare and fascinating glimpses of polar bears, walruses, wolves, caribou and ermine. The "suicidal" migration of the lemmings is covered, as is a harrowing life-or-death situation involving a wolverine and a rabbit. According to Disney's publicity machine, White Wilderness was three years in the making, requiring a team of nine cameramen. For its original release, the film was paired with the appropriately wintry Donald Duck cartoon Donald's Snow Fight (1942). ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The first portion of this Disneyland episode is essentially a trailer for the upcoming "True-Life Adventure" theatrical feature White Wilderness (here referred to by its working title, The Arctic Wilderness. The focus, both literally and figuratively, is on Herb and Lois Crisler, a husband-wife team of photographers who are dispatched to Alaska to film the migration of the caribou, the timber wolf, the Kodiak bear and other attractions. The remainder of the episode consists of the 1953 "True-Life Adventure" short subject Prowlers of the Everglades, said prowlers being alligators and other creepy-crawlies. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this "Adventureland" segment from the original Disneyland TV series, narrator Winston Hibler details the activities of Disney's documentary camera crew as they go to remote and frigid Lapland to film the migratory habits of the country's huge reindeer herds. It is shown how the nomadic Lapp tribes move along with the herds each year, to the western mountains during the summer and the lowlands during the winter (much of this footage was later released theatrically as Lapland). The remainder of the episode consists of the Oscar-winning 1953 documentary The Alaskan Eskimo, the inaugural entry in Disney's "People and Places" short-subject series. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Fantasia, Walt Disney's animated masterpiece of the 1940s, grew from a short-subject cartoon picturization of the Paul Dukas musical piece The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Mickey Mouse was starred in this eight-minute effort, while the orchestra was under the direction of Leopold Stokowski. Disney and Stokowski eventually decided that the notion of marrying classical music with animation was too good to confine to a mere short subject; thus the notion was expanded into a two-hour feature, incorporating seven musical selections and a bridging narration by music critic Deems Taylor. The first piece, Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor", was used to underscore a series of abstract images. The next selection, Tschiakovsky's "Nutcracker Suite", is performed by dancing wood-sprites, mushrooms, flowers, goldfish, thistles, milkweeds and frost fairies. The Mickey Mouse version of "Sorcerer's Apprentice" is next, followed by Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring", which serves as leitmotif for the story of the creation of the world, replete with dinosaurs and volcanoes. After a brief jam session involving the live-action musicians comes Beethoven's "Pastorale Symphony", enacted against a Greek-mythology tapestry by centaurs, unicorns, cupids and a besotted Bacchus. Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours" is performed by a Corps de Ballet consisting of hippos, ostriches and alligators. The program comes to a conclusion with a fearsome visualization of Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain", dominated by the black god Tchernobog (referred to in the pencil tests as "Yensid", which is guess-what spelled backwards); this study of the "sacred and profane" segues into a reverent rendition of Schubert's "Ave Maria". Originally, Debussy's "Clair de Lune" was part of the film, but was cut from the final release print; also cut, due to budgetary considerations, was Disney's intention of issuing an annual "update" of Fantasia with new musical highlights and animated sequences. A box-office disappointment upon its first release (due partly to Disney's notion of releasing the film in an early stereophonic-sound process which few theatres could accommodate), Fantasia eventually recouped its cost in its many reissues. For one of the return engagements, the film was retitled Fantasia Will Amaze-ya, while the 1963 reissue saw the film "squashed" to conform with the Cinemascope aspect ratio. Other re-releases pruned the picture from 120 to 88 minutes, and in 1983, Disney redistributed the film with newly orchestrated music and Tim Matheson replacing Deems Taylor as narrator. Once and for all, a restored Fantasia was made available to filmgoers in 1990. A sequel, Fantasia 2000, was released in theaters in 1999. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Mickey Mouse owns a remarkable state-of-the-art trailer that converts into a bungalow (and vice versa) at the flick of a switch. Goofy drives the trailer into the great outdoors, while Mickey prepares the meals (even unto milking a passing cow). The third passenger, Donald Duck, characteristically prefers to sleep and let everyone else do the work, but Mickey arouses the lazy mallard with some more 1938-style push-button technology. The real fun begins when Goofy rushes into the trailer for lunch--leaving his car unattending, still running, and headed toward some truly perilous mountain ledges. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi