Тірі шөл: Америка табиғатының деректі фильмі

1953 documentary film by James Algar
the zoo with the same name

The Living Desert is a 1953 American nature documentary film that shows the everyday lives of the animals of the desert of the Southwestern United States. The film was written by James Algar, Winston Hibler, Jack Moffitt (uncredited) and Ted Sears. It was directed by Algar, with Hibler as the narrator and was filmed in Tucson, Arizona. It is featured in the 2006 DVD Walt Disney Legacy Collection Volume 2: Lands of Exploration.

The Living Desert was the first feature length film in Disney's True Life Adventures series of documentaries focusing on zoological studies; the previous films in the series, including the Oscar winning Seal Island, were short subjects. The documentary was filmed in Tucson, Arizona. Most of the wildlife shown in the film was donated to what would soon become the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. The film was inspired by 10 minutes of footage shot by N. Paul Kenworthy, a doctoral student at the University of California at Los Angeles. Kenworthy's footage of a battle between a tarantula and a wasp intrigued Disney, who funded a feature length production following the lives of diverse desert species. Disney was highly supportive of Kenworthy's work and its impact on nonfiction filmmaking: "This is where we can tell a real, sustained story for the first time in these nature pictures". The Living Desert received some criticism for bringing unsubtle humor to its scenes of desert life – Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called Disney to task for adding jokey musical effects to several of the film's scenes, including hoedown music for a sequence involving a scorpion mating dance. Nonetheless, the film was a commercial success: the $300,000 production earned $4,000,000 at the box office.

The Academy Award that Disney earned for The Living Desert helped the producer make history as the individual with the most Oscar wins in a single year. At the 26th Academy Awards, in addition to winning the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, Disney also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom, the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) for The Alaskan Eskimo and the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Two Reel) for Bear Country. In addition to its Oscar, the film also won the International Prize at the 1954 Cannes Film Festival, an award at the Berlin Film Festival and a special achievement award from the Golden Globe Awards. In 2000, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".