ABSTRACT
When talking about the Disney True-Life Adventures series of films made between 1948 and 1960 Walt Disney famously remarked: “Nature writes the screenplays, we add the words for the narrator to say.” 1 His comment abbreviated the characteristics of the films in the series, which relied on the attribution of agency to nature and humanlike qualities to animals. True-Life Adventures purposefully excluded any human presence, offered an untouched and timeless envisioning of nature and, although live action, modeled their narratives and characters on those developed in the studio's animated features Bambi (1942) and Dumbo (1940).2 The affective dimensions of the music used in the True-Life films help to code the animals as stereotyped characters whilst the narrator's didactic voiceover frames the stories, which are duly constructed as action-packed dramas.
