Nonetheless, the narration strongly suggests that the behavior shown in the film is a form of unreasoning, compulsive march to death in which lemmings typically engage:ДЄ kind of compulsion seizes each tiny rodent and, carried along by an unreasoning hysteria, each falls into step for a march that will take them to a strange destiny. What the audience then sees is what appears to be a horde of lemmings entering the Arctic sea by jumping off cliffs and scampering across rock-covered beaches to enter the water from the shore, whereupon they swim out to sea and (weвЂ™re told by the narrator) eventually drown - not quite because theyвЂ™re simply committing suicide, the film states, but because theyвЂ™ve supposedly mistaken the vast expanse of the Arctic sea for a lake and assumed thereвЂ™s a reachable shore just across the water. The story is one of the persistent tales of the Arctic, and as often happens in ManвЂ™s nature lore, it is a story both true and false, as we shall see in a moment.

It is said of this tiny animal that it commits mass suicide by rushing into the sea in droves. The narration in the film accompanying the lemmings scenes begins as follows: But the scenes shown in the documentary were staged by filmmakers in order to replicate supposed real-life behavior of lemmings that could not be captured on film, and thus did Disney perpetuate for generations to come the legend of periodic, inexplicable mass suicides by lemmings who die by hurling themselves off of cliffs. Some of the most memorable scenes in White Wilderness, DisneyвЂ™s 1958 Academy Award-winning вЂњTrue-Life AdventureвЂќ nature documentary about wildlife in the snowy northern portions of the North American continent, were ones featuring lemming suicide: the death of lemmings who drowned after jumping off cliffs and into the sea.

Lemmings jumping off cliffs myth