This year will see the first films released by Disneynature, making good on Mickey’s New Year’s resolution to produce two nature documentaries annually for the foreseeable future. Reports on the endeavor (including the National Reviews’ always hilarious Planet Gore blog) portray it as novel. Yet, in its own press release, Disney speaks of “balancing heritage and innovation,” as Disneynature is a resurrection and rebranding of what the studio sold sixty years ago as “True-Life Adventures.”

Then as now, Disney’s motives are financial. Its early animated features (those without the iconic princesses) hemorrhaged money. Time consuming and labor intensive, they sent the studio’s producers looking for some way to balance the books. They tried propaganda for the military and industrial films for Detroit. And then in 1948 they landed on Seal Island. A fanciful trip to Alaska’s Pribilof Islands, which in mating season (according to Roy Disney himself) “looks like Coney Island on the Fourth of July,” the documentary cost a fraction of Bambi to make, raked in more money, and won an Oscar to boot. Eleven additional nature films would follow in the next twelve years, as the series begot the studio’s own distribution apparatus, Buena Vista, and raised its profile on primetime television. Today, as a recent restructuring has cut Disney’s annual production schedule in half and its first-quarter profits are down by 33%, it’s no wonder Chief Executive Robert Iger revealed to the New York Times his envy of March of the Penguins, the $3 million shoestring Warner Brothers used to lasso $127 million at the box office. The shining knights have been dispatched from Cinderella’s castle to try once again to, as Gregg Mitman’s writes, “mine the frontier of nature.”

Mitman takes us through the fascinating history of the “True-Life Adventures” in his Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Though Walt Disney liked to say that “nature wrote the screenplays,” Mitman reveals it to have been quite a bit more complicated than that. What showed up on screen was carefully constructed. Invisible barriers were installed to keep animals in frame; bait was distributed liberally; animal sounds (some from distant biomes) were overdubbed, along with original orchestral scores. In one case, wolf pups were airlifted in to be raised by filmmakers on location. The producers insisted on a measure of ecological accuracy, but the ultimate concern was narrative—in the words of one photographer, “to find each animal’s eccentricity and to somehow exploit it and incorporate the individualism into the story.”

When we tell stories, even stories about animals, we are talking about ourselves. The “True-Life Adventures,” are the story of the American middle class at midcentury. The editors were to always consider “the feelings of women,” and promote the universality of the nuclear family. Scenes of adult male seals stampeding across the helpless bodies of their young fell to the cutting-room floor. Female robins are praised by the narrator of Nature’s Half-Acre (1951) for their “mother love” and “devotion,” while mother cowbirds are “heartless creatures… one of Nature’s worst bums.” Not different in kind from the proto-reality television program Ozzie and Harriet, each film, such as the perfectly named White Wilderness, was a portrait of suburban culture. As Mitman argues,

For the young American families that ventures into True-Life Adventureland, their experience of Disney’s wilderness could be compared to their encounter with nature framed within the suburban setting of their ranch-style homes…. The most noted feature of the ranch house was the use of large insulated plate-glass picture windows and sliding-glass doors. Just as a True-Life Adventure established the audience as a spectator of nature, so the windows and sliding glass doors of the ranch-style home, which opened onto the same level as the surrounding tame and pastoral landscape, facilitated intimacy with nature through observation rather than active participation…. If nature had become domesticated in the suburban home, it had also been domesticated by Disney for the family audiences who lived on the edge of the “crabgrass frontier.”

First out of the gate for Disneynature is Earth, a repackaging of the 2007 BBC/Discovery Channel smash, Planet Earth. Essential to that series fulfilling its promise of showing viewers Earth “as you’ve never seen it before,” was deporting six billion inhabitants from the planet. Aside from glimpses of the filmmakers and the exotic appearance of indigenous Malaysians harvesting swiftlet nests from caves to make soup, humans and the constellation of biota with which we are associated were meticulously excised.

Policing the border between humans and the rest of the natural world was just as critical to Walt Disney in the 1950s. “There must be no evidence of civilization or man’s work in the picture,” he instructed all his field crews. Transgressors of the line between world’s—like the U.S. Fish & Wildlife boat (on which Seal Island’s crew hitched a ride) headed to oversee the brutal and exploitative seal-hunting season—were punished with exile. The voice-over in The Vanishing Prairie (1954) promises to depict the land as it was before “the relentless advance of civilization.” The beautiful fiction of wilderness appealed to the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. It represented a residual frontier, a place one could escape the homogenization of consensus-era America and play the pioneer. Beaver Valley (1950), Bear Country (1953), The Living Desert (1953)—these were places whose existence assured viewers that, in the words of Chief Justice William O. Douglas, “man need not become an automaton. There he can escape the machine and become once more a vital individual.”

Wilderness still holds the same attraction. But to it we add new meaning for our time. Planet Earth’s David Attenborough sees excluding people as a pre-requisite to telling a happy story about nature. He intends the program to be

a celebration of our planet, not a lament about the state of it. It shows what is still there. In some areas, there is no doubt we are doing damage to our world but, at the same time, there is a vast amount of uncharted and untouched wilderness.

His words lay the fiction plain. They require him to overlook the global reach of toxins and climate change, as well as the “charting” and “touching” of his own camera crews.

But what is the trouble with this human-free definition of nature Disney uses when it slams its brand-name up against the word? Planet Earth is no doubt a powerful tool for conservationists. Likewise, Disneynature’s portrayals-to-come of flamingos, cheetahs, and chimpanzees will no doubt engender a great deal of awareness of the status of these species, at the same time as they fill theaters, move stuffed animals, and perhaps keep the studio in the black.

At the same time, they will work to reinforce what Jennifer Price terms “the definition of Nature as a Place Apart.” The stories we today tell about nature too often are underscored by the fatalism in Attenborough’s words. “What is still there…of our planet” is, for him, only what can be found in places few human beings have ever ventured. There are but two landscapes: the damaged and the untouched.

We are starving for stories of human being interacting with nature in ways that don’t destroy it or render it unnatural. Working to preserve “what is still there” is critical, whether with fences, foundations, or documentary features. But without a more expansive, less mythic conception of nature, we cannot hope to turn attention to the health of the ecological settings in which we (and millions and millions of other living things) spend our days, nor to the many and varied pathways—ecological, economic, cultural—linking domestic and wild places.