1955 - THE AFRICAN LION, one of the Disney True Life Adventure films

File this under the "I'll watch anything" department.  The African Lion is part of the Walt Disney True Life Adventure series which ran from the late 1940's until the early 1960's before finally wearing our it's welcome.  The Disney company would purchase films from nature photographers and turn around and give them the Disney touch.  A folksy narrator , a music score which at times could get fairly silly and a story line.  I guess the films for the most part would be called documentaries but they are unmistakably Disney influenced documentaries.

The African Lion is considered one of the best in the series.  It was filmed on the Serengeti plains with Mt Kilimanjaro rising in the background.  The film proposes to be about the life of the lion but it incorporates lots of footage of the other species living on the plains.  Filmed in technicolor,  there are many impressive scenes of the animals.  Probably the worst thing you can say about the film is at times the narration by Winston Hibler gets to be a little to much.

 

The film was written and directed by James Algar, but the real stars of the film were the husband and wife team of Albert and Elma Milotte who literally followed the animals around for three years in a specially designed truck to photograph them.  

 

Obviously time has kind of taken the freshness off of this wildlife documentary.  Advances in photography have made the art of wildlife photography easier.  Still this is an impressive achievement and it is from a time when Africa was still a somewhat mysterious place.  

You can make some valid criticisms about Walt Disney and the product he put out while he was in change, but you can't argue that he occasionally was willing to try some new approach to story telling.  Today the Disney company seems to only be in the business of live action remakes of its classic cartoons or unending super hero movies.

The film was written and directed by James Algar who clearly organized the Milotte's animal footage into a narrative.  The running time is a brisk 75 minutes.