Or: The Creation Of The Myth Of The Lemming Suicide As A Metaphor For How I Work And Don’t
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… Following on from its 1953 success The Living Desert, Walt Disney Studios released White Wilderness in 1958, a film which won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature. Among the many spectacular nature scenes is a sequence depicting the frenzied migration and ultimate suicide of a horde of lemmings.
A kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny. [...] They’ve become victims of an obsession — a one-track thought: Move on! Move on! [...] They reach the final precipice. This is the last chance to turn back — yet over they go, casting themselves out bodily into space.
– Winston Hibler, narrating White Wilderness
Since lemmings don’t naturally display this behaviour, the scene was constructed artificially. Filming took place in Alberta, Canada, which is landlocked and has no native lemming population. Instead, dozens of animals were bought from Inuit children in Manitoba, several provinces away. Most of the ‘migration’ took place on a snow-covered turntable, with the scenes of a handful of frightened rodents running away, cleverly cut together to look like an enormous number migrating across the snowy tundra. Finally, they were taken to a cliff by a river and flung down into the water to their deaths, the shot carefully composed to make the river seem like an ocean.
When this was revealed in 1983, it incensed both scientists and animal rights activists. Unlike The Living Desert, White Wilderness is not listed in the ‘Movie Archive’ on the official Disney website.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMZlr5Gf9yY
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