Earlier this month, I wrote a piece about the climactic fire sequence from Bambi, during which I touched on the forest fawn's history as an on-and-off poster boy for wildfire prevention efforts, along with the genesis of Smokey Bear, the safety-conscious ursine created by the US Forest Service as a Bambi substitute who would go on to become an iconic part of the American cultural landscape in his own right. Since then, I've acquired quite an appreciation for forest fire prevention PSAs. Public service announcements (or public information films, as they're more commonly known in the UK) thrive on highlighting the evils of ignorance and the potentially life-altering consequences of a single moment's negligence, and with their characteristic mixture of the mundane and the shockingly cataclysmic, there's something deeply commanding about a well-made PSA that gets under our skin in ways that even the grisliest of horror films cannot touch upon. I find that forest fire prevention PSAs hold a particular fascination in the thin line they evoke between Edenic tranquility and all-out Apocalypse; that sense of the enormous fragility of the world, and of the difference between endurance and destruction of the most appalling magnitude hanging helplessly in the balance and on something as ostensibly insignificant as the striking of a match.
In the case of "Deadliest Animal", a PSA from 1969 (that's pretty much all of the background information I can uncover on this one), the actual Apocalypse is left almost entirely to our imagination. Instead, the film combines the charm and visual splendour of a nature documentary or a promotional travelogue with an almost incongruous sense of creeping menace. Watching "Deadliest Animal", one is struck by the sheer beauty of the animal photography, although this is immediately offset by the ominous dialogue, which poses a riddle (albeit one we already know the answer to - from the start we know that this is set to be one of those scenarios in which we will meet the enemy and he is us) as the camera assumes the perspective of an unseen presence prowling through the woodlands and prompting the resident wildlife to bolt in alarm. Like Bambi, "Deadliest Animal" derives its power from keeping its human element (predominantly) out of view, but unlike the Disney film, where Man is depicted as alarmingly alien force in the natural kingdom, "Deadliest Animal" recognises Man as one of the beasts, a strange creature with a curious duality - the highly evolved animal who has mastered the trick of starting fires but is less adept at controlling or containing them (either through weakness or negligence), and whose shortcomings in the latter area have the tendency to spell disaster for everything around it.
"Deadliest Animal" is a beautiful-looking film, although as with all really memorable PSAs there is a healthy undercurrent of horror, which here manifests in where it ultimately takes us. As we roam the forest floor with the deadliest animal, it leads us away from the picturesque imagery and into a world of uneasy darkness (a primal fear that the dialogue even explicitly acknowledges as one of our defining traits), where the sudden lighting of a match gives us our first glimpse of our nefarious representative. The animal's identity comes as no surprise, but the film's real punchline - "the deadly ones - the ones with the brains" - strikes hard in its quietly mocking irony. Once again, Man's most catastrophic blow to the natural world is dealt unconsciously, with that final lingering shot of the unchecked flame leaving us no doubt as to the towering inferno that lies in store.
Note: Audio from this film was later sampled by synthwave artist botnit for his track "Blaze". You can listen to it in full here.
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