The Living Desert

The Living Desert
Film poster for the double-feature release of The Living Desert and The Vanishing Prairie
Directed by	James Algar
Produced by	Ben Sharpsteen Walt Disney
Written by	James Algar Winston Hibler
Narrated by	Winston Hibler
Music by	Paul J. Smith
Cinematography	Robert H. Crandall N. Paul Kenworthy Jr.
Edited by	Norman R. Palmer
Production company	Walt Disney Productions
Distributed by	Buena Vista Distribution
Release date	November 10, 1953
Running time	69 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$300,000
Box office	$2.6 million (US)

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 movie 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. The film won the 1953 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

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 Academy Award-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 Jr., 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, stating, “This is where we can tell a real, sustained story for the first time in these nature pictures.”