The Living Desert

Production

The Living Desert was the first feature-length film in Disney’s True-Life Adventures series of documentaries focusing on zoological studies; the previous films in the series, including the Academy Award-winning Seal Island, were short subjects.

The documentary was filmed in Tucson, Arizona. Most of the wildlife shown in the film was donated to what would soon become the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.

The film was inspired by 10 minutes of footage shot by N. Paul Kenworthy Jr., a doctoral student at the University of California at Los Angeles. Kenworthy’s footage of a battle between a tarantula and a wasp intrigued Disney, who funded a feature-length production following the lives of diverse desert species. Disney was highly supportive of Kenworthy’s work and its impact on nonfiction filmmaking, stating, “This is where we can tell a real, sustained story for the first time in these nature pictures.”

Release

Prior to the production of The Living Desert, Disney was releasing his films through RKO Radio Pictures. But due to a long-frayed relation with the studio, which had little enthusiasm for the producer's documentary releases, Disney opted to sever his relation with RKO and create his own distribution subsidiary – Buena Vista Distribution, which he named after the street where his office was located.

The Living Desert received some criticism for bringing unsubtle humor to its scenes of desert life – Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called Disney to task for adding jokey musical effects to several of the film’s scenes, including hoedown music for a sequence involving a scorpion battle. Nonetheless, the film was a commercial success: the US$300,000 production grossed US$4,000,000 at the box office.

Honors

The Academy Award that Disney earned for The Living Desert helped the producer make history as the individual with the most Oscar wins in a single year. At the 26th Academy Awards, in addition to winning the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, Disney also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject for The Alaskan Eskimo and the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Two-Reel) for Bear Country.

In addition to its Oscar, the film also won the International Prize at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival, an award at the Berlin Film Festival and a special achievement award from the Golden Globe Awards. In 2000, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".