People and Places featurette The Danube

The Danube is Released

The Danube, the final film in the People and Places film series of travelogues consisting of 17 films made between 1953 and 1960, is a beautiful cinematic study of the people who live along the banks of the Danube, the second longest river in Europe. The documentary, which was shot in CinemaScope, concludes with a visit to the most famous of all cities along the Danube — Vienna. The film was directed by Ben Sharpsteen, who had joined the Company in 1929 and was considered one of Walt’s right-hand men. Sharpsteen was sequence director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, supervising co-director on Pinocchio and supervising director on Dumbo, among many other important assignments. Later, he worked Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and several of the True-Life Adventures. He received an Oscar® for Best Documentary Short Subject for producing The Ama Girls (1958), the People and Places documentary released two years before The Danube. Sharpsteen retired in 1962 and was named a Disney Legend posthumously in 1998.