This short, which won an Academy Award for Live-Action Short, is one of the most fascinating things that Disney has ever released. It follows one particular natural area for an entire year, from one spring through to the next. Because I want to discuss some details, this is a spoiler warning:
The short begins by explaining that "nature's Half-acre" can be found anywhere, including your own backyard. It then focuses in on the life cycle for one particular "half-acre", with a predominant emphasis on birds and insects, with a couple of reptiles given a brief introduction.
As always, the photography is breathtaking and the narration, though still occasionally to precious, is excellent. There's only one gimmicky sequence and they don't seem to have played around with the footage, but simply inserted musical scoring to something they caught on film, in an attempt to inject a comical note.
There might be a good reason to add some levity, because the overall point which is reinforced repeatedly in this one is that, in nature, most, if not all, creatures are on someone's dinner menu and predator can quickly become prey. Birds eat insects to survive, insects eat insects to survive, plants eat insects to survive and the list goes on. What matters to nature is that species continue and that the natural life cycle also continues.
There's a great deal of focus on death here, with caterpillars being kept in check because there are birds which thrive on them, spiders who thrive on flies and bees, chameleons who eat just about any kind of insects-almost everything is vulnerable.
But there's also an emphasis on the "life" part of "the life cycle", with scenes of flowers in bloom and the emergence of a butterfly from its chrysalis. A lot of this is shown through the use of time lapse photography, where something which may actually take hours or even days to happen can be shown in seconds or minutes. There are some exceptional sequences here. This is one of Disney's best.
This is available on Volume 4 of the True Life Adventures Series, which made up the first wave of the new Disney Legacy series of DVD releases. I recommend all four of the titles.
The short begins by explaining that "nature's Half-acre" can be found anywhere, including your own backyard. It then focuses in on the life cycle for one particular "half-acre", with a predominant emphasis on birds and insects, with a couple of reptiles given a brief introduction.
As always, the photography is breathtaking and the narration, though still occasionally to precious, is excellent. There's only one gimmicky sequence and they don't seem to have played around with the footage, but simply inserted musical scoring to something they caught on film, in an attempt to inject a comical note.
There might be a good reason to add some levity, because the overall point which is reinforced repeatedly in this one is that, in nature, most, if not all, creatures are on someone's dinner menu and predator can quickly become prey. Birds eat insects to survive, insects eat insects to survive, plants eat insects to survive and the list goes on. What matters to nature is that species continue and that the natural life cycle also continues.
There's a great deal of focus on death here, with caterpillars being kept in check because there are birds which thrive on them, spiders who thrive on flies and bees, chameleons who eat just about any kind of insects-almost everything is vulnerable.
But there's also an emphasis on the "life" part of "the life cycle", with scenes of flowers in bloom and the emergence of a butterfly from its chrysalis. A lot of this is shown through the use of time lapse photography, where something which may actually take hours or even days to happen can be shown in seconds or minutes. There are some exceptional sequences here. This is one of Disney's best.
This is available on Volume 4 of the True Life Adventures Series, which made up the first wave of the new Disney Legacy series of DVD releases. I recommend all four of the titles.