A nature documentary or wildlife documentary is a documentary film or series about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures. Nature documentaries usually concentrate on video taken in the subject's natural habitat, but often including footage of trained and captive animals, too. Sometimes they are about wildlife or ecosystems in relationship to human beings. Such programmes are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema. The proliferation of this genre occurred almost simultaneously alongside the production of similar television series which is distributed across the world.
Nature documentaries are sometimes equated with wildlife films, due to their emphasis on narrative and cinematic techniques such as continuity editing. Not all narrative films about wildlife are marketed as documentaries.
Cinema history
19th century experiments
From the 1870s to 1880s, Eadweard Muybridge produced the first short motion pictures intended to capture animal behavior, by recording moving animals in side profile. These locomotion studies were initially intended for narrow scientific use, "Descriptive Zoopraxography", as he referred to it.Bousé (2000)
Rough Sea at Dover (1896), by Robert Paul and Birt Acres, was a popular early silent film solely focused on the grandeur of nature itself, though it did not feature animals. The Sea Lions’ Home (1897), produced by Edison Studios, recorded wild animals in their natural habitat. Most filmed animals of the late 19th century were domesticated or zoo animals, recorded (albeit staged) as actuality films without any assigned story beyond animals moving or being fed.
1900s–1930s In Birdland (1907) by Oliver G. Pike used painstaking camerawork to capture footage of birds in their natural habitats. It is widely credited as the first wildlife film to receive a paid public screening, at the Palace Theatre in London. Yet its generally calm themes were an exception to a growing trend of staged violence in animal footage.
The most popular wildlife film narratives of the early 20th century involved violent, staged confrontations between captive animals in enclosed spaces or pits. Muybridge arranged for a captive tiger to kill a captive buffalo in 1884, but it took several more decades for staged violence to become more popular than peaceful zoo footage. This abusive genre was used most extensively by Frank Buck and Stacy Woodard in the 1930s. Buck inserted himself into the action (at one point wrestling a drowned tiger), while Woodard's pseudoscientific approach established the trope of "survival of the fittest", a misinterpretation of Darwinian theory to serve the claim that the animal world is a constant violent battle for supremacy. To some degree, nearly all major wildlife filmmakers of the early 20th century borrowed elements of staged combat. The Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act 1937 ended the production of staged animal combat films in the UK, and by the early 1940s they had fallen out of favor with general audiences in the United States as well.
Recorded hunting expeditions, starting with Hunting the White Bear (by Pathé, 1903), were another example of early narrative form in wildlife film. The Arctic, Africa, and India became preferred subjects for film-equipped hunters and naturalists such as Frank E. Kleinschmidt, Carl Akeley, Richard and Cherry Kearton, and Paul J. Rainey. Rainey's Africa Hunt (1912) was particularly popular for the breadth of its violent slaughter of lions, though prearranged slaughter was hardly unusual at the time. Cherry Kearton's Roosevelt in Africa (1910) filmed living animals in a style more typical of the developing documentary genre, while Theodore Roosevelt's exploits were more carefully curated throughout the narrative. Inspired by Rainey's films, Martin and Osa Johnson repopularized safari films in the 1920s, but few critics at the time acknowledged the manufactured format of their adventures. Martin Johnson died in a 1937 plane crash, and Osa continued to publish and star in more "adventures" up until her death in 1953.
More scientific animal documentaries were popularized in the 1910s by Raymond L. Ditmars, the Bronx Zoo curator of reptiles, as a way to more broadly disseminate his research. British Instructional Films introduced serialized natural history educational films through the Secrets of Nature series (1922–1933) by Percy Smith, Mary Field, and Bruce Woolfe. Despite their more educational leanings, Raymond Ditmar, Cherry Kearton, and the Secrets of Nature crew would frequently use humorous combinations of music, editing, and footage in their products. A few films of the early 20th century focused more on spectacular cinematography akin to modern nature documentaries, such as Alexander Korda's The Private Life of the Gannets (1934), which was the first wildlife short film to win an Academy Award.
1940s–1950s While most of the previous generation was retiring or dying, new innovative wildlife filmmakers came onto the scene in the 1940s, such as Hans Hass (best known for his underwater films) and Arne Sucksdorff (best known for his poetic cinematography).
Walt Disney Productions pioneered the serial theatrical release of spectacle-oriented nature documentaries with its production of the True-Life Adventures series, a collection of fourteen nature films (seven shorts and seven full-length features) from 1948 to 1960. These films were technically advanced and visually impressive, achieving both critical and commercial success at the time of their release. They carried over narrative tropes and cultural shorthands (such as young orphans, grand quests, and "family values") from the company's animated films such as Bambi (1942), as well as many animators and other personnel new to live-action filmmaking. Disney was far from the first company to project these themes onto animals, as seen in earlier literature and films such as Rango (1931) and Sequoia (1934), though it did help to bring them into connection with impressive visual splendor. Many hallmarks of later "blue-chip" documentaries, such as a supposedly pristine wilderness without human presence, have their basis in the True-Life Adventures. After a series of shorts, the series expanded into feature films with The Living Desert (1953) and The Vanishing Prairie (1954), both written and directed by James Algar. Despite their slicker appearance than older films, staged conflicts were still common occurrences in the True-Life Adventures, such as the infamous lemming herding scene from White Wilderness (1958).
The first full-length nature-documentary films pioneering colour underwater cinematography were the Italian film Sesto Continente (The Sixth Continent) and the French film Le Monde du silence (The Silent World). Directed by Folco Quilici, Sesto Continente was shot in 1952 and first exhibited to Italian audiences in 1954.Sesto Continente as mentioned at the IMDB website The Silent World, shot in 1954 and 1955 by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle, was first released in 1956.In 1956 The Silent World was released in three different countries: France (May 26, 1956), Japan (August 15, 1956) and the United States (September 24, 1956). See the release information page at the IMDB website. In 1959, Bernhard Grzimek created Serengeti darf nicht sterben (Serengeti Shall Not Die), one of the earliest nature documentaries with an environmental message.
Legacy Wildlife films, both small-scale and massive productions, continue to be created after the popularization of television, though broad theatrical releases are uncommon. The International Wildlife Film Festival was founded in Missoula, Montana in 1978. Other nature-focused film festivals followed suit, including the Wildscreen Film Festival (1982–) in Bristol, England, and the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival (1991–) in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Nature documentaries can still become major successes in traditional cinema. For example, La Marche de l'empereur (March of the Penguins) became the highest-grossing documentary film at the time of its release in 2005. Inspired by the success of March of the Penguins, Disney returned to wildlife films with their Disneynature series (2008–present), programs which share many thematic similarities to the older True-Life Adventures. Large-screen film formats such as IMAX are well-suited for blue-chip nature documentaries, many of which are exclusive to theaters which can support formats at such a scale. Beyond March of the Penguins, many of the highest-grossing nature documentary films represent Disneynature or IMAX productions.
Television history
1950s Many early television-based nature programs were adapted directly from theatrical films and shorts. Heinz Sielmann's Zimmerleute des Waldes (Carpenters of the Forest) achieved widespread interest when broadcast as Woodpecker on the BBC in 1955. Likewise, Disney's True-Life Adventures were often re-edited for use in company shows such as Disneyland (1954–1959) on ABC and Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color (1961–1968) on NBC. In the UK, presenter-led nature radio shows, such as Desmond Hawkins' The Naturalist and James Fisher's Birds in Britain (1951–1963), encouraged the BBC to expand into similar personality-driven television shows. In 1954, the BBC started airing Zoo Quest (1954–1963), featuring David Attenborough embarking on expeditions to capture live wildlife and populate the London Zoo. The BBC's Natural History Unit (NHU) was founded in 1957 to streamline production on nature documentaries. Both Attenborough and the NHU have become the most renowned and respected forces in the genre, releasing numerous high-profile documentaries up to the present day.
On NBC, Don Meier and Marlin Perkins cooperated on Zoo Parade (1950–1957), which had a similar format to Zoo Quest albeit for the benefit of the Chicago Zoo. Other early nature documentaries include CBC's Fur and Feathers (1955–1956), hosted by Ian McTaggart-Cowan,Ian McTaggart-Cowan bio shines light on pioneering TV nature program host and Look, a studio-based BBC magazine-program with filmed inserts, hosted by Sir Peter Scott from 1955 to 1981.
1960s As color television grew in popularity, NBC's Meier-Perkins collaboration expanded into Wild Kingdom (1963–1988), which merged the sensibilities of Disney's colorful nature films with the constraints of television production. The National Geographic Society began to produce television specials for CBS in the mid-1960s, including influential nature documentaries such as Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees (1965) and The World of Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1966).
The first 50-minute weekly documentary series, The World About Us, began on BBC2 in 1967 with a color installment from the French filmmaker Haroun Tazieff, called "Volcano". Around 1982, the series changed its title to The Natural World, which the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol continued to produce . In 1961, Anglia Television produced the first of the award-winning Survival series, which lasted up until 2001. It was eventually axed when the network introduced a controversial new schedule which many commentators have criticized as "dumbing down".
1970s-1990s Between 1974 and 1980, the Spanish nature documentary television series El Hombre y la Tierra (The Man and the Earth), produced by TVE and presented by naturalist Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, used 35 mm film, which posed significant logistic and technical challenges at the time. The show gained international recognition. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, several other television companies round the world set up their own specialized natural-history departments, including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Melbourne, Australia and TVNZ's unit in Dunedin, New Zealand — both still in existence, the latter having changed its name to "NHNZ".