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The film was directed by James Algar and narrated by Winston Hibler. It was filmed on location in Alberta, Canada over the course of three years.
White Wilderness famously contains a sequence supposedly depicting a mass lemming migration ending with the lemmings leaping to their death into the Arctic Ocean -- in fact, the entire sequence was staged. The lemmings were not even local (there are no lemmings in Alberta); the film makers arranged to buy wild-trapped lemmings from Inuit school children in Manitoba and transported them to the set. A few dozen lemmings, placed on a large, snow covered turntable and filmed from a variety of angles, became a mass migration. As a grand finale, the captive lemmings were herded over a cliff into a river (in the film, this was the "sea", and the herded lemmings were on a "suicide drive").
Generations of TV watching schoolchildren grew up on the Disney nature films, and the myth of lemming suicide persists to this day.