The Disney "True-Life Adventure" series of nature films that the studio began putting out in 1948 were not begun with grand ambitions. Walt Disney wanted to provide his animators with actual footage of animals in their natural habitat for research purposes, and Disney was not a man to waste stuff. Originally produced by Walt's nephew Roy Disney, the series wound up running a dozen years, winning a shelf full of awards, inspiring comic books and a panel cartoon newspaper series that outlasted the film series by a decade, and being recycled on Disney's TV show. (They can now all be had as a four-volume, double-disc DVD series.) Now, emboldened, perhaps in the sense that the fox was emboldened by the sight of those grapes, by such successes as the elevesn-part Discovery Channel series Planet Earth, Disney is looking to tap back into the audience for nature documentaries, which is now associated with the enthusiasm for all things green. The new movie is called Earth, and you may feel that you're picking up hints about the mindset at Disney these days when you see the TV commercials for the film (which opens on April 22, Earth Day) and hear a disembodied voice insisting that it's "even better than March of the Penguins." One the other hand, Disney has a history of using animals, both live and animated, to mangle kids' hearts, that it may have to live down if it wants to appeal to this market. Donna Farmer, a Los Angeles Web designer with two kids, told The New York Times, “I don’t need another Bambi moment."

The movie, which was made by the Planet Earth folks (including producer/director Alastair Fothergill) and is narrated by James Earl Jones, is the opening salvo from Disneynature, a new branch of the company headed by Jean-Francois Camilleri, with offices based in France. “Movies have grown so artificial — computer-generated and such, says Camilleri, "that there is a strong desire to see something beautiful and real.” Of course, we all have different ideas of what's beautiful. And not all nature documentary makers even have the same idea of what's real. The "classic" Disney series used a lot of sweetening, including staging scenes to create a "narrative", which sometimes made the animals seem as anthropomorphic as Cinderella's mice pals. (At the same time, Brooks Barnes notes, some cultural theorists "draw a line between his empathetic depiction of animals and the eco-political climate of the 1960s and beyond. Before the “True-Life” documentaries, wild animals were largely depicted on the big screen as objects to be killed and collected...Walt Disney gave them personalities, a vision that would draw criticism but ultimately influenced modern distaste for zoo cages and cramped aquariums.") The new movie depicts a year in the lives of three animal "families", and while the movie doesn't deny that nature often plays rough, it tries to finesse the ways in which it shows this truth so as to minimize the number of traumas in the audience. Baby elephants bite the dust, but off-screen. Originally Disneynature hoped to release two pictures a year, but a reality check has obliged them to scale those plans back. As Roy Disney probably could have explained to them over the course of a phone call, it takes a long time in the field to shoot one of these things.