THE VANISHING PRAIRIE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 884, 13 July 1956, Page 16

THE VANISHING PRAIRIE

(Disney-RKO) F I hadn’t Mr. Disney’s word to the contrary, I'd have been prepared to wager that The Vanishifig Prairie was made before The Living Desert, That is, I hope, a sufficiently tactful way of intimating that (in this department's opinion, at least) the VP. is not quite as good as its predecessor in the True Life Adventure series. And here, for once, to be tactful is to be fair for I am also certain that if I had seen The Vanishing Prairie first I would have had less to cavil at, But The Living Desert set a relatively high standard. Though inevitably "it had an episodic framework, showing the various groups of predators and victims in slightly artificial isolation from one another, the film as a whole did give some impression of ecological unity and balance-as if Disney’s men, determined to demonstrate the teeming life of an inhospitable region, had, in fact, recorded almost all of it, from the ants in the gros$-roots to the vulture "ring’d with the azure world." In The Vanishing Prairie the predatorvictim patterns repeat themselves. The cougar pouncing on the pronghorn replaces the lynx, gophers repeat the an-

tics and adventures of the kangaroo rats, the rattlesnake this time is pitted against a coyote instead of a hawk, and succumbs just the same. But in the still vast, if shrinking, sea of grass we don’t really get down to the grassroots-ex-cept those kicked aside by badger or prairie-dog. No spiders wage their campaign of deadfall and ambuscade, no bees bumble, no flowers bloom. One is not conscious of these omissions while the picture runs-at least not until the last sequence begins to fade-for, as usual, the photography is magnificent efid there is little that I would willingly have cut from the visuals (though I could have done with a little less of the oom-pah here and there). But on the way out one is aware of the omissions and a little regretful about them. There will be wild-life enthusiasts, however, who will count these losses slight age@inst such collectors’ items as the close-ups of the whooping cranes (now almost extinct), the fluid grace of the pronghorn antelopes, the unique record of a bison’s birth, the blazing red eye of a hawk-seen (I don’t know by what combination of good luck and patient management) from the dark interior of a gopher’s burrow. To the photographers-Tom McHugh, James -R. Simon, N. Paul Kenworthy, Cleve-

land P. Grant, Stewart V. Jewell, Herb Crisler and Olin Sewall-and to the director James Algar, Disney gives the credit. But he deserves a good deal himself for grubstaking them. Enough to cancel out completely whatever irritation one may occasionally feel at his smallboyish grotesqueries. Tocay the prairie is vanishing, tomorrow (who knows?) even the desert may have disappeared, its sands calcined by weapon-testing, its innocent fauna finally irradiated. It’s as well we have some record of them.