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.

"Nature's Half Acre" is the third installment of Disney's True Life Adventure nature films. They were very popular back in the day and even today they hold up quite well in most cases.

The film is supposedly set in some half acre plot...in order to show the amazing diversity of animal life there. My assumption is that many acres were actually used for the film....which isn't a major deal. But chameleons (featured in this film) don't live around Robins, Orioles and other animals often shown in the movie. After all, 100% realism isn't Disney's goal with these pictures...entertainment is first and foremost the point of the films. And, in the course of the picture, you see mostly tiny animals....which are often overlooked by people. Bugs, birds and tiny animals are the subjects of this film as well as some types of plants...particularly flowering and carnivorous ones.

In many ways, the film is like a nature ballet....with the actions of the plants and animals set to music. I was surprised that I actually liked the way this was done....and Disney really took great care to coordinate the music and film footage. Lovely to look at and filled with artistry...though something I am glad they didn't do too often in other films.

Overall, a lovely and well made film....possibly among the very best of Disney's nature films.



It's unfortunate that many of the older Disney True Life Adventure films posted to Disney+ have prints which are less than perfect. I cannot blame Disney....it looks like they tried to clean up the prints, but sometimes the animals in these films are a bit blurry or faded or too dark....as they sometimes are in "Nature's Half Acre". I mention this because the films were state of the art back in the 1950s....but today they've lost a bit due to film degradation.

"Nature's Half Acre" is a 32-minute Technicolor documentary from 1951, so this one already had its 65th anniversary last year. It was directed by James Algar and he is also part of the writer team here next to Winston Hibler who narrates this one and he was the writer on several Disney classics. This one here may be too unknown to be called a classic, but still it won Walt Disney one of his over 20 Oscars. The title already gives away that it is a nature documentary of course, but it is not about regions in the world you will never see, but instead the forest close to your home. There's major focus on birds and insects in here and you will only see very few creatures that are not typical for densely populated ares like the carnivorous plant for example. I think this was a really good watch and the narration was informative, but also entertaining at times. Sure if you are a nature documentary addict, then you probably won't hear or learn or see anything in here you haven't seen before, but your chronology should not punish this film for the actual chronology as this one here came first before almost all of the others. That's why it also won an Oscar. Disney is not just a trailblazer in animation, but also in wildlife documentaries, an area most people don't necessarily make a connection with Disney. But it's true. This half hour is criminally underseen and I highly recommend for you to do your share to change that. One of 1951's very best short movies. Highly recommended.