Psycho's Movie Reviews #412: Bambi (1942)

Bambi is a 1942 American animated drama film directed by David Hand (supervising a team of sequence directors), produced by Walt Disney and based on the 1923 book Bambi, a Life in the Woods by Austrian author and hunter Felix Salten. The film was released by RKO Radio Pictures on August 13, 1942, and is the fifth Disney animated feature film.

The main characters are Bambi, a white-tailed deer; his parents (the Great Prince of the forest and his unnamed mother); his friends Thumper (a pink-nosed rabbit); and Flower (a skunk); and his childhood friend and future mate, Faline. In the original book, Bambi was a roe deer, a species native to Europe; but Disney decided to base the character on a mule deer from Arrowhead, California. Illustrator Maurice "Jake" Day convinced Disney that the mule deer had large "mule-like" ears and were more common to western North America; but that the white-tail deer was more recognized throughout America.

The film received three Academy Award nominations: Best Sound (Sam Slyfield), Best Song (for "Love Is a Song" sung by Donald Novis) and Original Music Score.

In June 2008, the American Film Institute presented a list of its "10 Top 10"—the best ten films in each of ten classic American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Bambi placed third in animation. In December 2011, the film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant".

In January 2020, it was announced that a photorealistic computer-animated remake was in development.

Plot

A doe gives birth to a fawn named Bambi, who will one day take over the position of Great Prince of the Forest, a title currently held by Bambi's father, who guards the woodland creatures against the dangers of hunters. The fawn is quickly befriended by an eager, energetic rabbit named Thumper, who helps to teach him to walk and speak. Bambi grows up very attached to his mother, with whom he spends most of his time. He soon makes other friends, including a young skunk named Flower and a female fawn named Faline. Curious and inquisitive, Bambi frequently asks about the world around him and is cautioned about the dangers of life as a forest creature by his loving mother. One day out in a meadow, Bambi briefly sees The Great Prince but does not realize that he is his father. As the Great Prince wanders uphill, he discovers the human hunter named "Man" by all the animals is coming and rushes down to the meadow to get everyone to safety. Bambi is briefly separated from his mother during that time but is escorted to her by the Great Prince as the three of them make it back in the forest just as Man fires his gun.

During Bambi's first winter, he and Thumper play in the snow while Flower hibernates. One day his mother takes him along to find food when Man shows up again. As they escape, his mother is shot and killed by the hunter, leaving the little fawn mournful and alone. Taking pity on his abandoned son, the Great Prince leads Bambi home as he reveals to him that he is his father. Next year, Bambi has matured into a young stag, and his childhood friends have also entered young adulthood. They are warned of "twitterpation" by Friend Owl and that they will eventually fall in love, although the trio views the concept of romance with scorn. However, Thumper and Flower soon encounter their beautiful romantic counterparts and abandon their former thoughts on love. Bambi himself encounters Faline as a beautiful doe. However, their courtship is quickly interrupted and challenged by a belligerent older stag named Ronno, who attempts to force Faline away from Bambi. Bambi successfully manages to defeat Ronno in battle and earn the rights to the doe's affections.

Bambi is awakened afterward by the smell of smoke; he follows it and discovers it leads to a hunter camp. His father warns Bambi that Man has returned with more hunters. Although Bambi is separated from Faline in the turmoil and searches for her along the way, the two flee to safety. He soon finds her cornered by Man's vicious hunting dogs, which he manages to ward off. Bambi escapes them and is shot by Man, but survives. Meanwhile, at the "Man's" camp, their campfire suddenly spreads into the forest, resulting in a wildfire from which the forest residents flee in fear. Bambi, his father, Faline, and the forest animals manage to reach shelter on a riverbank. The following spring, Faline gives birth to twins under Bambi's watchful eye as the new Great Prince of the Forest.

Production

Development

In 1933, Sidney Franklin, a producer and director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, purchased the film rights to Felix Salten's novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods, intending to adapt it as a live-action film. After years of experimentation, he eventually decided that it would be too difficult to make such a film and he sold the film rights to Walt Disney in April 1937. Disney began work on crafting an animated adaptation immediately, intending it to be the company's second feature-length animated film and their first to be based on a specific, recent work. However, the original novel was written for an adult audience, and was considered too "grim" and "sombre" for a regular light-hearted Disney film. The artists also discovered that it would be challenging to animate deer realistically. These difficulties resulted in Disney putting production on hold while the studio worked on several other projects. In 1938, Disney assigned Perce Pearce and Carl Fallberg to work on the film's storyboards, but attention was soon drawn away as the studio began working on Fantasia. Finally, on August 17, 1939, production on Bambi began in earnest, but progressed slowly owing to changes in the studio personnel, location, and methodology of handling animation at the time.

Writing

There were many interpretations of the story. As Mel Shaw claimed

"The story of Bambi had a so many possibilities, you could go off on a million tangents. I remember one situation when Walt became involved with himself. He said 'Suppose we have Bambi step on an ant hill and we cut inside and see all the damage he's done to the ant civilization'. We spent weeks and weeks developing the ants, and then all of a sudden we decided, you know, we're way off the story, this has got nothing to do with the story of Bambi. We also had a family of grasshoppers, and they get into a family squabble of this or that, and Bambi is watching all of this, and here's the big head of Bambi in the grasshoppers. And what's that got to do with the story, and this would go on many times."

Originally the film was intended to have six individual bunny characters, similar to the dwarfs in Snow White. However Perce Pearce suggested that they could instead have five generic rabbits and one rabbit with a different color than the rest, with one tooth, would have a very distinct personality. This character later became known as Thumper.

There originally was a brief shot in the scene where Bambi's mother dies of her jumping over a log and getting shot by a man. Larry Morey, however, felt the scene was too dramatic, and that it was emotional enough to justify having her death occurring off screen. Walt Disney was also eager to show the man burned to death by his fire that he inadvertently started, but this was discarded when it was decided not to show the man at all. There was also a scene involving two autumn leaves conversing like an old married couple before parting ways and falling to the ground, but Disney found that talking flora did not work in the context of the film, and instead a visual metaphor of two realistic leaves falling to the ground was used instead. Disney and his story team also developed the characters consisting of a squirrel and a chipmunk that were to be a comic duo reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy. However, after years of experimentation, Walt felt that the story should focus on the three principal characters: Bambi, Thumper and Flower. The squirrel and chipmunk make only brief appearances in the final film.

The writing was completed in July 1940, by which time the film's budget had increased to $858,000.

Animation

Although the animators had animated deer in Snow White, they were animated, in the words of Eric Larson, "like big flour sacks". Disney wanted the animals in Bambi to be more realistic and expressive than those in Snow White. He had Rico LeBrun, a painter of animals, come and lecture to the animators on the structure and movement of animals. The animators visited the Los Angeles Zoo and Disney set up a small zoo at the studio with animals such as rabbits, ducks, owls, and skunks, and a pair of fawns named Bambi and Faline so that the artists could see first-hand the movement of these animals. Rico LeBurn's sketches depicted realistic animals, but as characters they lacked personality. Marc Davis created the final design of Bambi by incorporating LeBurn's realistic study of deer anatomy but exaggerating the character's face by making his proportions baby-like (short snout, big eyes, etc.). Although there were no humans in Bambi, live-action footage of humans was used for one scene: actress Jane Randolph and Ice Capades star Donna Atwood acted as live-action references for the scene where Bambi and Thumper are on the icy pond. The animators learned a lot about animals during the film's production, giving them a broader spectrum of animation styles to use in future projects.

The backgrounds for the film were inspired by the Eastern American woodlands. One of the earliest and best-known artists for the Disney studio, Maurice "Jake" Day, spent several weeks in the Vermont and Maine forests, sketching and photographing deer, fawns, and the surrounding wilderness areas. However his first sketches were too "busy" as the eye did not know where to focus. Tyrus Wong, a Chinese animator, showed Day some of his impressionistic paintings of a forest. Day liked the paintings and appointed him art director of the film. Wong's backgrounds were revolutionary since they had more detail around the centre and less around the edges, thus leading a viewer's eye to the characters.

Due to World War II, which began in Europe in 1939, Pinocchio and Fantasia failed at the box office. Facing financial difficulty, Disney was forced to cut 12 minutes from the film before final animation to save production costs.

Songs

All lyrics are written by Larry Morey; all music is composed by Frank Churchill.

Release/Reception/Box Office

Bambi was released in theaters in 1942, during World War II, and was Disney's 5th full-length animated film. The film was re-released to theatres in the United States in 1947, 1957, 1966, 1975, 1982 and 1988. It was then made available in North America on home video in 1989 and in the UK in 1994. Even in home video, it has seen multiple releases, including three VHS releases — in 1989 (Classics Version), 1997 (Masterpiece Collection Version), and 2005 (Platinum Edition version), one Betamax release in 1989 (Classics version), two Laserdisc releases in 1989 (Classics version) and 1997 (Masterpiece Collection version) — and most recently a digitally-remastered and restored Platinum Edition DVD. The Platinum Edition DVD went on moratorium on January 31, 2007.

Bambi was released as a Diamond Edition on March 1, 2011, consisting of a Blu-ray and DVD combo pack. This release included multiple bonus features not previously included in Bambi home releases: a documentary entitled Inside Walt’s Story Meetings – Enhanced Edition, two deleted scenes, a deleted song, an image gallery, and a game entitled Disney’s Big Book of Knowledge: Bambi Edition. This release also marked the first use of "Disney Second Screen", a feature which is accessed via a computer or iPad app download that syncs with the Blu-ray disc, allowing the viewer to follow along by interacting with animated flip-books, galleries and trivia while watching the movie. A UK version of Diamond Edition was released on February 7, 2011.

In honour of the film's 75th anniversary, Bambi was released as part of the Walt Disney Signature Collection on May 23, 2017 (digital) and June 6, 2017 (Blu-ray/DVD/digital combo pack).

At the time of the film's release, Bambi received mixed reviews from the critics, mainly because of the lack of fantasy elements in the film and objection towards a dramatic story of animals and their struggle to survive in the woods and avoid the threat of humans. The New York Times claimed that "In the search for perfection, Mr. Disney has come perilously close to tossing away his whole world of cartoon fantasy." Manny Farber of The New Republic deemed the film "unpleasant". He also stated that "In an attempt to ape the trumped-up realism of flesh and blood movies, he has given up fantasy, which was pretty much the magic element." Even Disney's daughter Diane complained, saying that Bambi's mother did not need to die. When Walt claimed that he was only following the book, Diane protested, saying that he had taken other liberties before and that Walt Disney could do whatever he wanted.

Today, however, Bambi is viewed as one of the greatest animated films ever made. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 90% based on 52 reviews with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website consensus reads: "Elegantly animated and deeply touching, Bambi is an enduring, endearing, and moving Disney classic."

Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 91 out of 100 based on 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Critics Mick Martin and Marsha Porter call the film "the crowning achievement of Walt Disney's animation studio". English film historian Leslie Halliwell wrote that Bambi was "one of Disney's most memorable and brilliant achievements with a great comic character in Thumper and a climactic forest fire sequence that is genuinely thrilling". He concluded that it was "a triumph of the animator's arts."

The film received three nominations at the 15th Academy Awards including the Academy Award for Best Original Song (for "Love Is a Song" sung by Donald Novis), Academy Award for Best Original Score (Frank Churchill, posthumous), and Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing (Sam Slyfield).

In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "10 Top 10" – the best ten films in ten classic American film genres – after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Bambi was acknowledged as the third best film in the animation genre. It is also listed in the Top 25 Horror Movies of All Time by Time magazine. Bambi, Time states, "has a primal shock that still haunts oldsters who saw it 40, 50, 65 years ago."

The film was released during World War II and did not perform as well as hoped. Roy O. Disney sent a telegram to his brother Walt after the New York opening of the film that read: "Fell short of our holdover figure by $4,000. Just came from Music Hall. Unable to make any deal to stay third week. Night business is our problem." The film earned RKO theatrical rentals of $1,270,000 in the United States and Canada in its initial release.

Disney lacked access to much of the European market during the war, however, the film earned rentals of $1,685,000 internationally for a initial worldwide total of $2,955,000, Disney's third highest, behind Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) with $7.8 million and Pinocchio (1940) with $3.2 million.

In its first reissue in the United States in 1947, the film earned additional domestic rentals of $900,000 but did much better 10 years later, more than doubling the domestic rental total with a further $2.5 million taking its total domestic rental earnings to $4.7 million.

The film earned $14 million in domestic rentals from its reissues in 1966 and 1975 giving it a total domestic rental of $18,735,000, which equates to a gross of around $40 million. In 1982, it grossed another $23 million in the United States and Canada and in 1988, a further $39 million, taking its total in the United States and Canada to $102 million, making it (at the time) the second highest-grossing animated movie of all-time after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. With grosses from international reissues, the film has a worldwide gross of $267 million.

Budget $858,000

Box office $267.4 million

My Review

Hard to believe that "Bambi" is already 70 years old and yet no other pieces of animation ever came close to it. You can mention "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King", any Disney's acclaimed masterpiece, still, nothing can beat the good old animation drawn by hand and on that level, watching "Bambi" is like admiring the 'Mona Lisa' of Animation. The American Film Institute recognized "Bambi" as number three in its Top Ten Animated films right after "Pinocchio" and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". I guess, the pioneer deserved the top spot if only because without "Snow White", there wouldn't have been "Bambi".

And the progresses made between the two films are tremendous; look closer to the animal designs, in the former they look like animated creatures from short cartoons, while "Bambi" doesn't focus only on aesthetics but also on scientific exactitude. The film doesn't forget to be simply Animation, but the realism of the landscape, the drawing, everything makes it hard to believe that it was made only five years after "Snow White". "Bambi" is a tribute for the inspiring level of perfectionism that elevated its animated movies at the same level of Hollywood's greatest masterpieces, it's a tribute to Disney's ambitions as a true film-maker, as he never took anything for granted. Every successful film was an encouragement for making a better one and after "Bambi", it was naturally impossible to make something better. It's not surprising that the film closes what we refer now as Disney's Golden Age.

I don't want to make "Bambi" sound only like a technical achievement, after all, even as a kid, my eyes and my heart were grabbed by the story. But now, as a grown-up, more familiar with today's animated films, I see "Bambi" with constant marvelled eyes, I can turn off the sound and never cease to be amazed by how it look, or I could close my eyes and simply let myself transported by the music. "Bambi" would never work today, because animated films are marketed for a different audience, eager to see fast-paced action, hilarious sidekicks, lager- than-life villains and catchy songs. These are the must of Animated films and it's interesting to note that "Bambi" handle these elements with a sober maturity that would put most kids to sleep now. I can't believe I'm saying this, me who is 40 years younger than the film.

"Bambi" was made in a time where people had a reason to see movies that was beyond the idea of entertainment. Audiences wanted to be transported in another dimension and to be emotionally engaged, their eyes marvelled by a dreamlike world that transcends the banality of their life. Just look at the beginning of "Bambi", certainly the most haunting of all Disney overtures. From the first frames, it feels like a camera is filming a forest, it's a long traveling shot in a foggy, misty, dark setting we would never leave until the end. The audience is respectfully invited to penetrate the world of Bambi, quietly discreetly, until the first animals wake up to see the New Prince, then we follow them with excitement. "Bambi"'s opening sequence echoes the beginning of "The Lion King" in a much more intimate way, and when we discover the new-born Bambi sleeping beneath his Mother, we share the same impression than the animals.

In many ways, "Bambi" reminds of "The Lion King" and vice versa, but while "The Lion King" was a sort of Disney take on typical Shakespearian themes, "Bambi" doesn't embarrass itself with a specific plot, but for me, what has often been pointed out as a flaw happens to be the film's most defining force. "Bambi" doesn't tell a story because "Bambi"s main protagonist is not Bambi, but Time, Time is as present as Man although both can't be seen, and the whole film consist for us to witness the passing of time in Bambi's. Bambi is the central character but not the core of the film, which helped to deal with a story without needing pointless foils. His best friends, Thumper and Flower are real friends not supporting sidekicks. "Bambi" is a movie about time, inviting us to contemplate time's effect on animals, nature. The way each season is portrayed through music and colours is simply magical.

And "Bambi" ends just like it started, it's indeed the 'circle of life' with a scope so large that we can't even talk of a coming-of-age story: from the beginning, Bambi learns how to walk, to talk, he discovers this strange feeling we call love. And the toughest lesson the Prince of the Forest had to face is the one forever engraved in the traumatized minds of generations of children and adults. "Bambi" doesn't have a plot, which makes every piece of action absolutely powerful. After the first entrance of Man that interrupted the deer's ballet, there is one 'bang' that warns us about his presence. And when the Mother, who tutored Bambi for the two thirds of the film, feels Man's presence, she immediately covers her son by running behind him. The last shot of Bambi jumping followed by the fatal sound is one of the most brutal, shocking and admirably powerful displays of violence in a film, and the sadness that comes after the beautiful sacrifice is impossible to describe.

This is the most disturbing death in a Disney film, and probably in any film, a necessary pivotal device in 'coming-of-age' stories but never equalled with this intensity. Disney created a villain even scarier because he was off-screen and his presence only identifiable with an ominous theme, doesn't that ring a bell to you, cinematic fans? Well, I guess no one can review "Bambi" without evoking the most characteristic and memorable part of the film, but needless to say that "Bambi" is more than that, a unique experience to be enjoyed because there would never be another film like it... 9.9/10