Walt Disney’s True-Life Adventures began with a printed statement. “These films,” it said, “are photographed in their natural settings and are completely authentic, unstaged and unrehearsed.” This promise was there at the start of Seal Island in 1948, and the following 27 minutes of narrated footage all but invented the nature documentary.



Despite the success of Bambi in 1942, Disney had struggled to convince RKO, his distributor, that anyone would pay to watch films of animals in the wild. But after Seal Island won an Oscar and became a hit, the struggle was to meet demand. By the time the series finished in 1960, there had been 14 True-Life Adventure films, eight of them Oscar-winners. They were now fixtures in classrooms all over the world. However, as Disney’s nephew Roy, who produced the series, later put it: “We kept that disclaimer a little longer than we should have.”

Did they jump or were they pushed? … the lemming show

It’s obvious when you think about it that making a good nature documentary is ridiculously hard. It took five years to produce 11 hours of television for the BBC’s first Planet Earth series in 2006, including two hours of the Diaries, which explain how difficult it all was.

To get footage of chinstrap penguins in wild seas for Planet Earth II, which airs on Sunday, the crew had to camp on an active volcano in the middle of almost permanent storms in the remotest reaches of the Southern Ocean. And they had it easy: like the seals on Seal Island, the penguins were everywhere. More often, getting close to an animal for long enough to capture clear, exciting footage is a severe challenge, even with modern equipment. No wonder the makers of the True-Life Adventures soon began to cut themselves some slack.

In 1982, Canadian investigative show The Fifth Estate talked to several people who had worked on the films and it became clear that many famous sequences were phoney. The polar bear rolling comically down a snow-covered slope in White Wilderness was put there, sources said, as were the slope and the snow. The first feature-length True-Life Adventure, The Living Desert, was mostly staged, according to the cameraman and animal trainer Bill Carrick. “They built all the interiors and put mice and rattlesnakes and everything in their little sets,” he said. For Perri, essentially a live-action sequel to Bambi about the life of a squirrel, they found a very simple way to film the heroine narrowly escaping predators: just film her not narrowly escaping at all, shout cut, then call for a fresh Perri.

But most infamous of all was the lemming sequence, also in White Wilderness. Ironically, the film-makers set out of disprove the myth that the animals sometimes commit mass suicide. Instead, they show what appears to be hundreds of lemmings “migrating” senselessly into the sea. “It’s not given to man to understand all of nature’s mysteries,” says Winston Hibler in his best fireside tones. “But, as nearly as he can surmise, it would appear that these lemmings consider this body of water just another lake.”

Poster for the White Wilderness show. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

In fact, man did know better, or some men did – because the footage was shot in Alberta, Canada, where there aren’t any lemmings. To fix this problem, the crew paid children in Canada’s northern Manitoba region 25¢ per lemming to round some up. The animals were then driven south and placed on purpose-built turntables to make it seem like a horde of them was passing the camera. Finally, they were taken to the Bow river and shovelled off the bank. “Soon,” we are told, to the sound of a mournful clarinet, “the Arctic Sea is dotted with tiny bobbing bodies.”

Despite drowning very convincingly, the brown lemmings were actually miscast, because that species does not migrate. It’s the yellow-tufted Norway lemming they should have had. Whatever. White Wilderness and The Living Desert each won an Oscar, and Disney continues to market the films, and other True-Life Adventures, despite Roy Disney himself having said: “There was a time when we were presenting a lot of footage – that we knew was staged – as having occurred naturally.”

Cousteau's crew ram a whale, shoot it out of mercy, then hack to death the sharks that try to eat it

To be fair to Disney, few of the nature film-makers who came immediately after were much better, and some were worse. Jacques Cousteau’s first film – 1956’s The Silent World, which won an Oscar and the Palme d’Or at Cannes – encourages viewers to care about marine life. Yet the crew blow up a coral reef with dynamite, accidentally ram a baby whale with their ship, shoot it out of mercy, then hack to death the sharks that come to eat the corpse. “All the sailors of the world hate sharks,” the voiceover explains, as if nothing else needs to be said.

Then there was Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, probably the most popular nature show in the history of American television. It ran from 1963 to 1984 and won five Emmys, having been created to spread the reputation of its insurance sponsor as “People you can count on”. However, a number of people came forward to say they had created the show’s special moments themselves, by procuring tame animals that they would then pretend to “trap” or “rescue”.

Dynamite and guns … Jacques Cousteau oversees the hoisting of a whale in The Silent World. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Some witnesses said that Wild Kingdom would release live pigs or armadillos as prey in order to film them being killed, or even train groups of wolves and cougars to take ownership of the same deer carcass, in order to start a fight. As with Cousteau and Disney, the message was always to care for wildlife – still a relatively new idea – yet at times the entertainment was like something from the Colosseum.

In retrospect, that Fifth Estate broadcast in 1982 looks like a turning point. David Attenborough’s authoritative Life on Earth series had aired three years earlier, while Wild Kingdom came off air three years after. In the new era, waiting months to get five minutes of footage was just about feasible, but it still did not guarantee the kind of authenticity people expected. The BBC’s shows are probably considered the most trustworthy all over the world, but they include some footage of zoo animals – a fact that shocked by many people during the Frozen Planet polar bear scandal of 2011. There may also be some digital manipulation, as was used in the BBC’s recent Hidden Kingdoms series.

Disclaimers in the credits tend to go unnoticed, but disclaimers at the outset spoil the show. Even the most famous footage of all – when Attenborough frolics with gorillas in Rwanda in 1979’s Life on Earth – might now be considered dishonest and dangerous. Dishonest because they were not typical gorillas, but groups being studied by Dian Fossey and thus comfortable around humans. Dangerous because no researcher now would interact so closely with wild gorillas, for fear of giving them a human disease to which they have little immunity.

A Fifth Estate programme from 2008 claimed that tame animals, many provided by a company called Animals of Montana, were still routinely used in nature films. The British series Survival used a captive striped hyena from a trainer, it alleged, and Imax, National Geographic, Animal Planet and the BBC Natural History Unit are all listed online among Animals of Montana’s clients. At the very least, it seems safe to assume that most of the sound effects you hear on a nature documentary have been added later.

In one way, Steve Irwin solved the problem. In another, he made it worse. Known as The Crocodile Hunter after the title of his TV series, Irwin grew up in his parents’ reptile park and was comfortable getting close to animals that would terrify most people. Capturing special moments was never a problem in Irwin’s films. He provided them himself by nearly getting eaten, or picking up deadly snakes by the tail. This entertained by creating confrontations, and probably caused some stress to the animals, but it was at least honest – and Irwin’s love for them was never in doubt. When a stingray killed him in 2006, however, it was easy to feel that something of the kind had been on the way.

Frolics … David Attenborough with gorillas in 1979’s Life on Earth. Photograph: PA

In effect, having made the world care more about wild animals, nature documentaries had no choice but to reform themselves. And better standards may be coming. The producers of Planet Earth II promise that drones and remote recording technology have improved so much that the show “will change the way we see the natural world”. Watching a bedraggled sloth paddling across a river, in a sequence shot from below the waterline that perfectly captures every churning claw, it is hard to disagree.