I Knew The Story About The Disney Documentary And The Lemmings, But I Just Found Out It's Even More Disturbing Than I Realized

I don’t remember when I first learned that lemmings were a stand-in for people who blindly follow something without questioning it, but it wasn’t long after that when I learned where that comparison came from. White Wilderness, a wildlife documentary released by Disney in 1958, infamously features a scene with hundreds of lemmings leaping and tumbling down a cliff into an ocean to their death.

The poor animals, the documentary makers claim, are so doggedly determined to reach their destination that they will die trying. It’s suicide on a mass scale, they explain. So, the saying goes, people who are willing to do something as crazy as these lemmings for something that they don’t understand will lead them to destruction, are just like lemmings.

Of course, none of that is true. Here’s the true story, and even if you think you know it, it’s much worse than you think.

The Scene Was Completely Staged

In the 1950s, Walt Disney and his company dominated the Best Documentary category at the Oscars. The company produced three winners in the category in the decade, all for films in its series called True-Life Adventures. It picked up another five Academy Awards for Best Documentary Short from the same series, for eight wins in total. The final film to win was 1958’s White Wilderness, in part for the dramatic scene featuring the hapless lemmings jumping to their death in the ocean, where they all drown.

For a couple of decades, the reputation of the series, like most Disney wildlife documentaries, was unchallenged, and hence, the saying about lemmings became part of everyday culture. That changed in 1983 when CBC in Canada produced an exposé about wildlife documentaries and highlighted the now-infamous scene for its deception. The filmmakers faked the scene, the news report showed.

I knew all of that. I learned years ago that the scene had been fake and that lemmings don’t commit mass suicide. I always assumed that filmmakers herded a bunch of lemmings and forced them to jump off the cliff. I was wrong, the truth is that the lemmings weren’t even jumping into the ocean, and the scene wasn’t even filmed in a part of Canada where lemmings are native.

What White Wilderness Claims

In the documentary, the lemmings are purportedly shown falling to their death on the edge of the Arctic Ocean in northern Canada. Lemmings are native to very cold, northern parts of the globe, including that area. In the scene, viewers see the lemmings struggling on the ice and snow as they approach the cliff, and then, dramatically, they start jumping off one by one.

After some intense scenes of the lemmings tumbling down the cliff, they are shown swimming out into the ocean until, finally, they all die from exhaustion. The narrator of the film says in a voiceover,

The final moments of the sequence show dozens of dead lemmings floating in the ocean, which, according to White Wilderness, the poor rodents think the is “just another lake,” hence their drive to keep moving. It’s a powerful scene sold as a wonder of nature that scientists don’t fully understand. Later, we would all learn, there is a reason the phenomenon can’t be explained: it doesn’t actually happen.

It Was Shot On The Banks Of A River In Alberta

According to the CBC exposé, the real story about just how fake the scene is is way worse than most people knew (including me). The scene was filmed in Alberta, on the banks of the Bow River, just outside the town of Canmore, Alberta, which is about 60 miles from Calgary. Alberta, it’s worth noting, is a landlocked province that doesn’t border any ocean, including the Arctic.

It’s a dramatic moment when the host of the CBC program is shown standing on the shores of the Bow and the camera pulls back to show a large bridge over the river and the city of Calgary behind him. It was about as “wild” as a zoo and a place you’d be more likely to see river rats than lemmings. Lemmings are not even native to that part of Alberta. It turns out, the filmmakers imported the rodents.

The Lemmings Came From Hundreds Of Miles Away, And Pretty Much Everything Was Fake

The lemmings, it seems, were caught in Manitoba, many by Inuit kids who were paid a quarter per animal and then shipped down to the filming location in Alberta. The level of cruelty shown by the filmmakers is startling. Even the scenes of the animals struggling on the ice are fake.

According to one of the people interviewed by CBC, the filmmakers used “lazy-susan-like” devices to spin the lemmings and show them struggling to walk on the ice. There were also far fewer animals than claimed, as the filmmakers simply used the same few dozen (not hundreds) of lemmings over and over with some movie magic. They didn’t even go up north to get actual footage in the wild, they just faked it all.

I had always assumed that the makers of the so-called documentary had found a spot where they could herd the lemmings over the cliff and into the ocean after I learned the scene had been faked. That’s not what happened, according to the report. Not only did they drive the lemmings to the cliff, but when the animals didn’t actually jump, the producers resorted to shoving and tossing the poor things over the cliff and filming the aftermath.

Disney And Walt Disney’s Family Have Disavowed The Film

It is important to note that there is no claim in the CBC report or anywhere else that Walt Disney, or his production company, knew anything about the deception by the White Wilderness filmmakers. The company has disavowed the movie, and it’s buried deep in the company vault alongside movies like Song of the South. While other films in the True-Life Adventures series are available to watch with a Disney+ subscription, this is not, and likely never will be.

The Walt Disney Family Museum says in a description of the movie on its website that the producers filmed the act of animal cruelty “without the knowledge or approval of Walt,” and the CBC report came out years after his death. There is no reason to believe that Disney knew of the event, and they obviously aren’t interested in reviving the spurious film any time soon.