Walt Disney's Dinosaurs: The Story of The Rite of Spring

Jillian Noyes writes . . .

As kids, we all had our favorite dinosaur films.  For many millennials, the seminal The Land Before Time (Don Bluth, 1988) brings about a wave of nostalgia. For others, Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) has no comparison.  A few may even cite Disney’s groundbreaking CG epic Dinosaur (Ralph Zondag & Eric Leighton, 2000) as a personal favorite, even if it’s aged quite poorly.

For me, however?  My favorite dinosaur film was (and still is) the Rite of Spring segment in Walt Disney’s magnum opus Fantasia (1940).  The interplay between Stravinsky’s ballet score and spectacular displays of prehistoric barbarism immediately struck a chord with me and my younger brothers when we first saw it as dinosaur-obsessed kids.  Forget the big-eyed, cutesy Bluth-o-saurs like Ducky and Littlefoot - if you wanted to see dinosaurs in all their terrifying majesty but weren’t allowed to watch Jurassic Park, The Rite of Spring reigned supreme.

No contest, really. IMAGE CREDITS: Universal Animation Studios/Amblin Entertainment (Land Before Time); Walt Disney Animation Studios (Rite of Spring)

As a Film Studies major, my appreciation for Rite of Spring has only deepened over the years, and I’ve come to find the making-of process behind it just as fascinating as the finished product.  What’s especially interesting is how Disney’s dinosaurs are a time capsule of what was considered to be the cutting edge of paleontology in the 1930s and early 1940s.  With the benefit of scientific hindsight, it also demonstrates just how much paleontology has advanced in the last 80 or so years.

At the turn of the century, dinosaurs were just beginning to creep into the public imagination thanks to the efforts of Roy Chapman Andrews, Friedrich von Huene, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and the non-profit museums who were all too happy to display their findings to enthusiastic crowds. It’s hardly surprising, then, that characters like Gertie the Dinosaur (Windsor McKay, 1914) were among the first animated movie stars, albeit significantly less scary than how museums presented them.

But Walt Disney was about to subvert things entirely.

From the very start of preproduction on Fantasia in September 1938 Disney wanted to include a prehistoric sequence that would serve as “a coldly accurate reproduction of what science thinks went on during the first few billion years of this planet's existence” (Fantasia).  So he brought on Julian Huxley, Barnum “Mr. Bones” Brown, and Roy Chapman Andrews as scientific consultants for the project, along with Edwin Hubble.  To think that all of them worked on the same project -- an animated film, no less! -- is mind-boggling.

Disney, Hubble, and Huxley - a meeting of geniuses. IMAGE CREDIT: Huntington Digital Library

Each man contributed his own expertise to the film, based on the most-cutting edge studies of the time.  Huxley, hard at work on his magnum opus Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, shared his research on genes and their role in biological development, which animators translated to the screen in a hypnotic prelude sequence dubbed the March of Life.  Speaking from his own experiences in excavating fossils from Howe Ranch Quarry in Wyoming, Brown explained his hypothesis that the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction was caused by intense drought.  This too was memorably rendered in the finished product, specifically during the climax of the work, in which scorching sunlight spares no creature.  As for Andrews, the exact nature of his contributions are unclear.  Given Walt Disney’s penchant for live modeling sessions, though, one can reasonably assume that he granted animators access to the American Museum of Natural History’s extensive fossil collection for reference.

Some of the amazing concept art and initial treatments for the short. IMAGE CREDIT: Walt Disney Animation Studios Archives

Concept art was drafted, model sheets based on clay maquettes were developed, and animals were brought in for the animators to study their movements (including a baby alligator!).  The goal, as Disney put it, was to have “science, not art, write the scenario of the picture” (Fantasia).  As such, no detail was spared.

Of course, science marches onward, and what was considered “coldly accurate” in 1940 is hilariously inaccurate now.  Cataloging every single fault would be fruitless (especially since some have already done it).  What’s far more interesting, at least in my opinion, is that Disney and co. actually got some details right.

During the most iconic sequence of the short, a Tyrannosaurus rex and a Stegosaurus do battle against a backdrop of ominous rain and crackling thunder.  While the Stegosaurus puts up a good fight, uppercutting the carnivore with its spiky tail, it proves to be no match for T. Rex, who swiftly clamps down on the herbivore’s neck and bites down until its prey drops dead with a hearty thud.

Of course, this scenario is laughable, given that the two dinosaurs in question lived 150 million years apart from each other.

IMAGE CREDIT: Walt Disney Animation Studios Archives

But look closely at the animation cell above, taken directly from the aforementioned scene.  In one of the very few instances where aesthetics were given precedence over accuracy, Disney insisted that the big beastie of the piece have three fingers rather than two.  Why?  “I really think it looks better with three” he reportedly said (Moore, 207). 

Now, which carnivorous beast bore some resemblance to T. Rex (to the point that there’s been some classification confusion over the past century or so), lived in the same era as Stegosaurus, and had three fingers (which I’ve conveniently counted?)

IMAGE CREDIT: Wikimedia.commons.

That’s right, Allosaurus.  As it turns out, Disney’s aesthetic eye proved to be more accurate than science years before it was conclusively proven by paleontologists.

That’s far from the only accidental accuracy demonstrated by Disney and his animation team.  Several dinosaurs in the short demonstrate complex herd-like behaviors - a far cry from the image of the solitary, isolated lizard beast which dominated scientific and cultural thought at the time (Switek).  Many of them are lumbering and brutish, but there are also creatures that are agile and lithe - again, foreshadowing the revelation that dinosaurs were closely related to avians .

But as interesting as coincidental predictions may be, that’s not what makes Rite of Spring such an enduring work.  Rather, it’s the way in which it engages directly with the viewer, using animation to show a perspective which was once deemed impossible to witness. “Science is brought to life in a way that no textbook can possibly do”, Brian Sibley wrote of the film, and it’s that aspect which makes me appreciate it so much more than Land Before Time and its ilk.  Far from being “cute animal personalities” - Disney’s words, not mine (Fanning) - the dinosaurs in Rite of Spring tap into our most primal fears and desires in order to suture us into the most animalistic of perspectives.  When Stegosaurus succumbs to T. Rex, a part of us withers away along with the former’s remains.  When we witness dinosaurs hatching from eggs, hope is restored in us.  When the dinosaurs fight to survive, we are reminded just how brutal our own existence can be. There is no latent metaphor for a modern-day controversy like in Jurassic Park; no clear-cut heroes or villains like in Land Before Time – just us and the dinosaurs who are completely oblivious to their own mortality.  That universality, I believe, is what makes the short so special and timeless.

Rite of Spring resides in the company of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Night on Bald Mountain as Fantasia’s greatest legacy.  It’s inspired countless artists, researchers, scientists, and paleontologists – not to mention countless parodies and riffs.  It revolutionized the kinds of stories which could be told through animation, pushed scientific boundaries, and inspired new discoveries.

But most importantly, it proved that the impossible was possible.  Against all odds, Disney had succeeded in bringing dinosaurs back to life.

References:

Fanning, Jim. "Fifteen Fascinating Facts About Fantasia." D23. Walt Disney Company, n.d. 01 Nov. 2016.

Moore, Randy. Dinosaurs by the Decades: A Chronology of the Dinosaur in Science and Popular Culture. Santa Barbara. California: Greenwood, an Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2014. Print.

Seastrom, Lucas O. "Fantasia’s Rite of Spring as a Scientific Document: Edwin Hubble, Julian Huxley, and the Fusion of Science & Art." University of Walt Disney. N.p., 23 June 2014.

Switek, Brian. "Disney's Age of Dinosaurs." Smithsonian. Smithsonian Institution, 5 Dec. 2011.

Four Features of Historical Counterfactuals

Derek Turner writes . . .

In 2015, the following meme flashed across social media:

Folks on the political left shared this in large numbers, and with considerable righteous indignation. People complained that in all their years of schooling in the United States, no one had ever shown them this map! Why weren't kids taught about the Native American polities that were diminished or erased by Euro-American colonization and settlement? But then someone pointed out that this map was never intended to represent any actual historical political landscape. Oops. From the very beginning, it was an exercise in counterfactual history. What political units would exist in 2015, had the epidemics, the violence, and the displacement not occurred? 

Those who didn’t already have egg on their faces quickly responded that even as an exercise in counterfactual history, the map is both far-fetched and ethically problematic. It’s ethically problematic because it still represents the erasure of many Native nations and communities that exist today.  It also builds in an assumption that indigenous polities would develop into units that look like European nation states. And don't call the Puebloans of the southwest the "Anasazi." Here, though, I want to focus more on the epistemological than on the ethical problems. What the map represents seems far-fetched and speculative. I’m very confident in saying that. But what exactly are the grounds for making such an assessment?

A Multidimensional Epistemology for Historical Counterfactuals

In general, historical counterfactuals take the following form:

If some upstream condition A had been different, then downstream outcome C would have happened instead of what actually happened.

In an earlier post, I tried to make a little headway by drawing a distinction between preventing and enabling conditions. Some counterfactual claims are about upstream conditions that prevent downstream outcomes from happening, while other counterfactuals are about upstream conditions that make it possible for downstream outcomes to occur.

Here I carry the analysis further by distinguishing four other dimensions along which historical counterfactuals can vary. I’ll call these upstream departure, downstream departure, historical depth and historical slack.

Variation along these dimensions can affect whether counterfactuals are reasonable or (like the one above) far-fetched. My view is that it really is possible to assess counterfactuals, even when it comes to the deep past. There is, however, no easy formula for doing so.[1] The assessment is always holistic and often messy. But identifying these dimensions of variation is a good start. 

Upstream Departure

When thinking counterfactually, we can imagine bigger or smaller deviations from what actually happened upstream. To assess the degree of upstream departure, focus on the upstream conditions alone. It’s hard to be precise about the size of the upstream deviation from the actual, but some easy examples will make it clear that in practice, we often have a pretty good idea of what counts as a bigger vs. smaller upstream departure.

(1) If Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont had won the Democratic nomination in 2016, then Donald Trump would not be president of the United States.

(2) If Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut had won the Democratic nomination in 2016, then Donald Trump would not be president of the United States.

I don't know whether either of these statements is true, though I’m sure a lot of people believe (1). Note, however, that (2) involves a bigger upstream departure than (1). In making this judgment, we have to draw on background knowledge—for example, that Sanders and Clinton were engaged in a competitive primary race, and that Chris Murphy was not seeking the nomination at all. There’s a sense in which the departure described in (1) could easily have happened, whereas it’s very hard to see how the departure described in (2) could have happened. Claim (2) is also, I think, a lot harder to assess than (1), for the simple reason that we have less evidence about what sort of campaign Chris Murphy might have run, or how people might have responded to him.

Downstream Departure

Historical counterfactual thinking also involves imaginative departures from what actually happens downstream, and these, too, can be bigger or smaller. Thus:

(3) If Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination in 2016, then he would have won the states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, defeating Donald Trump by a narrow electoral margin.

(4) if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic nomination in 2016, then he would have won the general election in an electoral college landslide.

I'm not sure if claim (3) is true, but these sorts of claims are worth thinking about, if only because lots of people believe them. And people argue about them all the time.

Again, in order to assess the degree of departure from what actually happened, we have to consult our background knowledge. The results of popular voting in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were pretty close, so (3) would seem to involve a small departure from the actual past. But popular voting results in many states, including a number of reliably red states, would have had to come out very differently in order for Sanders to win an electoral landslide. In this case, hopefully, it’s easy to see that (4) involves a bigger downstream departure than (3).

Historical Depth and Historical Slack

Historical depth is a matter of the amount of time that has elapsed between the upstream and the downstream conditions. The political examples above are all historically shallow, which also makes them a bit easier to think about. The counterfactual map of Native American political bodies is historically deeper. The counterfactuals we might care about in paleontology—like some of the claims that Gould makes in Wonderful Life—are vastly deeper.[2]

Historical Slack has to do with the relationship between the upstream change and the downstream change.[3] Here’s the rough idea: Historical counterfactuals are tight when the upstream departures from actual and the downstream departures move in tandem. That is, a tight counterfactual asserts that a big upstream change makes for a big downstream change. Or that a small upstream change makes for a correspondingly small downstream change. Historical counterfactuals exhibit more slack when the upstream departures and the downstream departures have different magnitudes—for example, where a small upstream change is said to lead to a big downstream change, or where a big upstream change is alleged to make little difference downstream. (Note: I'm treating slack as a feature of the counterfactual claims, rather than a feature of history itself.)

Rolling Back History

What I’ve said so far is really just an opening sketch. Much more needs to be said about how these four features—upstream departure, downstream departure, depth, and slack—bear on the question of whether it’s rational to believe counterfactual claims. And then much more needs to be said about how this might apply to questions about evolutionary history.

However, with nothing more than these opening distinctions on the table, it’s possible to glimpse an epistemology of historical counterfactuals that’s different from one standard approach. In his book, The Philosophy of Philosophy, Timothy Williamson describes an imaginative “rolling back” method for assessing historical counterfactuals—a method that sounds very similar to Gould’s thought experiment of replaying the tape of history, the topic of John Beatty's recent post, though Williamson seems unaware of Gould.

The offline use of expectation-forming capacities to judge counterfactuals corresponds to the widespread picture of the semantic evaluation of those conditionals as “rolling back” history to shortly before the time of the antecedent and then rolling history forward again according to patterns of development as close as possible to the normal ones to test the truth of the consequent.[4]

So we rewind the tape of history in the imagination, make the upstream changes, and run the tape forward while holding as much fixed as we can.

[O]ne supposes the antecedent and develops the supposition, adding further judgments within the supposition by reasoning, offline predictive mechanisms, and other offline judgments … To a first approximation: one asserts the counterfactual conditional if and only if the development eventually leads one to add the consequent.[5]

Apply this to the case with which we began: Roll back time, say, to 1492. Then “suppose the antecedent”—suppose that Europeans do not come to North America to colonize, settle, displace, or dispossess. Then roll history forward again, while relying upon other background knowledge. Do things end up as represented in the map above?

This account of the rolling back method is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t take us very far, because it doesn’t say anything about the differences among counterfactual claims, and how those differences might matter epistemically. What we need to do is contrast different historical counterfactuals, while focusing on the dimensions outlined here.

So What’s (Epistemically) Wrong With the Map?

One problem with the map, as an exercise in counterfactual history, is the magnitude of the upstream departure. The map exhibits considerable historical depth (500+ years), and a fair degree of tightness, since the suggestion is that huge upstream departures would have made for correspondingly big downstream changes in political outcomes. But the upstream departure puts out of play so much of what we know about the world, that it becomes very difficult to get a fix on what the resulting downstream departure should be.

But we should be careful not to conclude that bigger upstream departures always make for less plausible historical counterfactuals. Or that smaller upstream departures generally make for greater plausibility. Consider:

(5) If time-traveling Homer Simpson had sneezed 66 million years ago, then everyone today would have forked tongues. 

(6) If no asteroid had hit the earth 66 million years ago, then humans would not exist today.

Whether someone sneezes is a much smaller change than whether an asteroid hits. Yet the counterfactual (6) with the much bigger upstream departure is vastly more plausible than (5). These examples, show, I think, that the assessment of historical counterfactuals has to be holistic and multidimensional. It won't work to focus on upstream departure alone. Much also depends, for example, on relevant background knowledge about the causal connections that might link the upstream with the downstream departures.

Thanks

I shared some of these ideas with an audience at UCLA’s Cotsen Institute for Archaeology in November 2015. (This partly explains my use of a non-paleontological example here!)  I also want to give a special thanks to Ramzi Kaiss for many helpful conversations about contingency and counterfactuals last year. 

[1] But see Avi Tucker, Our Knowledge of the Past. Cambridge University Press, 2004, who tries to account for assessment of historical counterfactuals within a Bayesian framework.

[2] S.J. Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History. W.W. Norton, 1989.

[3]Tucker says that that “when historiographic counterfactual hypotheses are overstretched across many causal links, evidence is missing for determining them” (2004, p. 231). This notion of stretching across many causal links is ambiguous between historical depth and historical slack.

[4] Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy. Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p. 150.

[5] Williamson (2007, p. 153.)