‘Bambi’: An Animation Thesis, 75 Years Later…

A nice little break from the more personal stuff and ramblings, I wanted to talk about Walt Disney’s Bambi…

Yesterday, August 9th, marked the 75th Anniversary of the film’s world premiere in London, which predated the general American wide release by a few weeks. Disney recently re-released the title on Blu-ray to celebrate, in an edition that is more-or-less like its previous home video release despite some little issues here and there. I watched the film for the first time in a few years, and dived into some of the immersive, comprehensive bonus features. I remembered why I loved this film so much, why I feel it’s one of Disney’s greatest achievements, and it also reminded me of why I love animation in the first place.

I can trace it back to when I was eight years old. Being born in 1992, I didn’t own the first-ever VHS release of Bambi. That vaulted around early 1990, as it was only available for a few months. 4 1/2 years after I was born, Walt Disney Home Video re-released Bambi on VHS and LaserDisc as part of their Masterpiece Collection line. By this time, Disney was beginning to put bonus material on these VHS tapes, while touting their restorations. As a young child, Bambi did not do it for me, and its fiery finale gave me a good scare. When movies scared me at that age, I didn’t want to take them out of the cabinet.

Years and years later, I had seen many films that had imagery that was just as intense if not worse. When I was in third grade, I found myself going through all my Disney VHS tapes, interested to see what the movies were like. I was seeing recent Disney animated movies like Tarzan and Pixar films like A Bug’s Life, so why not try out the old films? Part of my desire to do so was also based on my fear of some films when I was younger. I wanted to watch these movies and see if I could handle them that time around, if I had “conquered” my fear per se, or to see if they were really all that scary in the first place.

By age eight, I was an avid sketcher. I was always drawing or doodling something, everywhere. Home, school, at relatives’ houses, I always needed to draw something! By late 2000 or so, I was really getting into the earlier Disney animated features. One viewing of my VHS of The Jungle Book introduced me to a behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of the film.

Years back, I stopped the tape at this part. I was five when I first got this VHS, and once the movie was over, it was over. I didn’t want to see the “real people” parts, I wanted the “cartoon.” Three years later, in late 2000, that viewing of The Jungle Book and what was after the movie’s conclusion completely changed my life. The 15-minute special completely sucked me in, and there I learned about Walt Disney. He was a person who existed! Prior to that, I didn’t know anyone who had the name “Walt,” and Disney is so unusual and uncommon as a surname. I just took the words “Walt Disney” as just words, “Walt Disney.” That night, I learned he was a person who was a mastermind behind all these movies, that he died years and years ago, and that these movies were made up of lots of drawings.

Soon enough, I checked out my other VHS tapes to see if they had similar behind-the-scenes specials on them. To my happiness, my Bambi VHS had one. Having lived in a rural area my whole life, Bambi particularly struck a chord with me. Its abstract yet naturalistic portrayal of the wilderness didn’t fly over my head as a child. I loved those visuals, I loved the music, I loved how everything was portrayed. I drew forests and deer nonstop throughout the year, and obsessed over the movie. Perhaps it was my most-watched Disney film when I was 8-going-on-9. Sure, I liked the cartoons that were being shown on television and other Disney releases (some I regret loving, such as Lady and the Tramp II) that were rather new at the time, but I saw something in Bambi… I knew, even back then, that something about it was truly special.

Upon revisiting the film in roughly 2005, when I was going on thirteen, I loved it in ways I never did in the past. Throughout my life, it has remained a favorite of mine, and a major influence on my own work. Prior to the film’s 2011 Blu-ray release, I knew it scene-for-scene… Again, it had been a long time since I watched the whole film all the way through, rather than just certain sequences. So I decided, with nothing better to do the other night, to spin my Signature Edition Blu-ray of the film…

Bambi is a thesis, a thesis that argues why animation exists and what is so incredible about the medium…

The adaptation of Felix Salten’s Bambi, a Life in the Woods ended up being Walt Disney’s fifth animated feature film, despite entering development when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was in production. Walt had intended their coming-of-age story of a young deer to be the studio’s second film, but various complications halted its progress, allowing the likes of Pinocchio and “The Concert Feature” to move to the forefront. The studio would also have to bring their A-game, because the subject matter called for it: The realistic portrayal of animals.

Through many story sessions, it was decided that the animators study live animals. Some were studied at zoos, through films, and even at the studio. After much debate, it was decided that the look of the forest wouldn’t be hyperrealistic, as capturing every minute detail would be impossible. The work of a Chinese artist working for the studio named Tyrus Wong began to make the rounds, and soon Walt wanted the inbetweener’s impressionistic style to be the look of the film. During work on Fantasia, the story took a decidedly different route. Instead of making a conventional fantasy adventure in the vein of Snow White and Pinocchio, Walt began to turn his attention to how music and visual storytelling could be as effective, if not more so, than dialogue.

Bambi, being the studio’s fifth feature, feels like Walt trying again with the grand experiment that was Fantasia, but applying it to a feature-length narrative. I feel that there are slivers of this in Dumbo, a quickly-made feature that was belted out as gap-filler. Pinocchio had flopped at the box office in the spring of 1940 due to the outbreak of World War II just a few months earlier. A popular film here in the United States, the gross revenue wasn’t enough to make the high-budgeted opus profitable. Dumbo was sort of made into a “B-picture” of sorts. Something quick, easy, and low-budget that would save the studio some time on Bambi and other planned productions, such as The Wind in the Willows and Peter Pan.

Like Bambi, Dumbo is a film with minimal amounts of dialogue. Most of the storytelling is done either through the visuals, or through songs that are not – in breaking the structure of the studio’s first two films – sung by characters onscreen. In Bambi, the music itself has an even greater presence. The film does have songs that are sung offscreen, but its score really helps tell the story. A choir adds to this greatly, and even provides sound effects, from the blowing wind to the hellish inferno of the forest fire. The music is all there to emphasize the world around these animals, who speak in conservative amounts. There’s a report that Walt Disney himself, when the film was close to completion, complained that there was too much dialogue in what is actually a very quiet film.

Certainly quiet by today’s standards, that’s for sure. Animated movies nowadays, even very good ones, have this habit of being too talky. A good balance that we see in better films (like say, an Inside Out or Zootopia type) breaks up the chit-chat with quiet moments that communicate ideas through body language and what is happening onscreen. Bambi went even further than that some 75 years ago, letting visuals and score do the talking. This is something you’re just not going to see in most animated films being made today.

You also won’t see an animated movie nowadays that doesn’t care about “plot.” Walt Disney and his story team understood that characters and personality make a picture, not a plot. The characters and why we should be invested in them is the story, not “what happens.” Like that Roger Ebert quote, “It’s not what it’s about. It’s how it is about it.” Bambi is not a classical three-act story, its main characters don’t go on a continuous journey, nor does the film center on Bambi learning one thing that drives a whole story. The film is like a series of vignettes, not dissimilar to Fantasia, that detail the sort-of day-in-the-life of a deer who becomes a prince. His trials and life struggles are illustrated through short moments that tell everything you need to know, without excessive exposition or needless filler. By contrast, the much-acclaimed The Lion King – a film that follows in Bambi‘s footsteps – makes the death of Mufasa, Scar’s takeover of Pride Rock, and Simba’s responsibilities the main focus of an 88-minute film. Bambi, in roughly 70 minutes, details the young fawn’s whole life and the various life-changing events he has gone through.

That would be a no-no in today’s cinema world, which demands “plot” and explanations and such out of everything. Bambi still looks and feels groundbreaking in an animation landscape littered with movies like Despicable Me and The Boss Baby and Sing. Walt Disney’s films are often written off entirely by various commentators and even, to an extent, Disney themselves. Popular opinion declares that Disney’s animated features became sophisticated and adult-friendly starting with 1989’s The Little Mermaid, and that everything that came out beforehand was childish, or too simplistic to be taken seriously on a storytelling level… But if you’ve actually watched these movies, you’ll know that this is very untrue.

Having lots of subplots and little intricacies does not a sophisticated or good movie make, Bambi is almost like an avant-garde film compared to what has come after it. Bambi may not have a million things going on at once like a big interlocking, pocket watch behemoth, but it does have everything… Just because it isn’t many minutes longer or doesn’t tell its story a more conventional way doesn’t make it a shallow, simplistic film. There’s ridiculous amounts of textures woven into the proceedings, all made clear by either what you’re seeing or what you’re hearing. In the film’s early minutes, the bright colors and pastoral imagery give Bambi’s thicket home and surrounding forest full of small critters a sense of safety and warmth.

That warmth is challenged when Bambi experiences his first thunderstorm. The initial drizzle of rain, portrayed with a song called ‘Little April Shower,’ is like a mysterious yet inviting new discovery for the fawn… Then it ominously turns to a mighty, godly series of bangs and crashes. To the young fawn, thunder is terrifying, and the combination of animation, lighting, art direction, score, and roaring vocals perfectly captures that in a way that real life and live-action can not. This mixture of elements is used relentlessly throughout the picture.

Adolescent Bambi’s fight with a rival deer for his sweetheart Faline goes almost completely abstract, with the two shadowy deer fighting as the color/lighting goes bananas, and the sound effects mostly take a back seat. It’s absolutely heroic and entrancing.

The forest fire climax makes fire terrifying through paintings, astounding effects, and musical instruments, with cymbal crashes being the chief. As usual, the lighting and color matches the mood wonderfully. You really feel that these animals are facing something truly horrific. As if the fire itself is a force…

Bambi’s date with Faline is as ethereal as you can get, with boosted colors and shades all around, and heavy emphasis on them.

The whole meadow act is a barrage of moods: At first the meadow is foreboding and uncertain, but once birds happily fly around, the meadow is safe and bright. The march of stags then makes the cheery meadow a thunderous stomping ground, but then the meadow is like a regal throne room when the majestic, enigmatic Great Prince of the Forest – a stag with massive antlers – slowly walks out onto the field. That all changes when we get our first glimpse of… Man.

Soon, the mood is frantic, chaotic. As deer run, they change multiple colors, emphasizing the sheer danger and fear. The backgrounds take on different colors to heighten the mood. Called “melodrama” by some, I see effective and unconventional ways of getting ideas across that live-action just can’t do.

A little something about Man…

We never see a single human being in this film. We never see a gun barrel. All we hear are gunshots. “Man” is spoken of thrice, but briefly. First, by Bambi’s mother to Bambi after everyone flees the meadow. Five words…

“Man… Was in the forest.”

Lastly, towards the end when multiple hunters set up camp in the woods. All we see is the faint trace of the camp with smoke filling the air, the Great Prince says to Bambi…

“It is Man… He is here again… There are many this time… We must go deep into the forest. Hurry, follow me!”

Lastly, in a sequence with three pheasants hiding in tall grass while Man looms closer (Man’s leitmotif is more than enough to make any scene nerve-wracking), the worried pheasant of the group talks about how terrified she is of them approaching:

“Listen, he’s coming.”

“Hush, be quiet.”

“He’s coming closer!”

“Calm down, don’t get excited!”

“We’d better fly!”

“No, no, don’t fly! Whatever you do, don’t fly!”

“He’s almost here! I can’t stand it any longer!”

Notice something about all these lines of dialogue?

Not once in this film does an animal talk about how “evil” Man is, or how malevolent hunters are. Man is treated as a force, not a bipedal being walking around with a death machine. The closest thing we get to Man in this film is a pack of hunting hounds, almost demonic-looking canines animated by a novice Retta Scott. Man itself, despite how much of a force it is to the animals, is no match for nature even. While the original intention was to flat out say that the hunters were indeed killed by the very fire their carelessness created, it’s implied in the finished film when we see the forest completely ablaze.

Other animated movies tend to not only show “Man,” but also have their animal characters talk about how bad Man is, how Man must be stopped, how this, how that. Take the 1978 animated adaptation of Watership Down for example, a similar film that’s often used to knock Bambi. Most folk who feel this way, from what I can see, cling onto Watership Down mostly because the movie is significantly darker and scarier than Bambi. Watership Down, to its credit, shows some serious violence and the severe ramifications of humans’ disregard for the environment. Some moments in that film are genuinely horrifying and disturbing, but the film – I feel – sometimes lacks the profundity of Walt’s supposedly inferior film.

After a survivor rabbit named Holly recounts the destruction of their home at the hands of land developers, one rabbit in Watership Down remarks “Men have always hated us.” Then Fiver says, “They’ll never rest till they’ve spoiled the Earth.” On-the-nose much? I much prefer how Bambi portrays Man as enigmatic. It’s something to be feared, something that simply can’t be stopped, and something that will kill you. They don’t know why, all they know is that they have to hide, like real animals would do. Bambi may not contain the blood and sometimes graphic violence of Watership Down, but that does not make it an inferior film, nor does it render its portrayal of nature as insignificant. Violence and inappropriate material does not a good movie make. When a story calls for it, it is necessary, but you don’t absolutely need it all of the time.

Walt Disney wasn’t making Bambi for children, however. The Walt Disney of the early 1940s strongly believed in animation, and knew it was a legitimate storytelling medium. Long before his more family-friendly approach to entertainment in the 1950s, Walt was a filmmaker like everyone else in Hollywood. The early Disney films are some of the studio’s most intense works. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has plenty of sequences that range from unnervingly spooky to flat-out terrifying for the younger set, Pinocchio is perhaps Disney’s darkest work that effortlessly disturbs adults and children alike, Fantasia has many sequences of scares and even violence. Walt was often criticized and the studio had gotten many angry complaints from parents at the time, but did Walt Disney care? No.

The much talked-about death of Bambi’s mother was a shock for many audiences and even critics back in 1942. You see, in Snow White and Pinocchio, no good guy “dies” on screen. Snow White clearly kills off its villain. Both films have main characters who come back to life, though. In Snow White‘s case, she’s put under a spell that will make the dwarves assume that she passed away. We, the audience, know that it’s a spell, but when the dwarves hold her funeral, it’s a truly crushing moment. It’s because we know that they have no idea about the spell, and we’re reacting to their emotions and their connection to Snow White. In Pinocchio, Pinocchio actually does die and Geppetto knows it, but the Blue Fairy turns the sentient marionette into a flesh-and-blood person. Both happy endings. Fantasia has a sequence where a stegosaur is killed onscreen by a tyrannosaur, but very few people saw Fantasia in the early 40s, and the few who did mostly weren’t pleased with what they saw.

Bambi, by contrast, was a more mainstream release. Audiences around the country saw Bambi, and many of them were shocked by the “first death” in a Disney cartoon. A mother character no less, which no doubt upset many children, but it also upset many adults. Reviewers complained that Bambi was too realistic to be a cartoon, with one remarking “Mickey wouldn’t be caught dead in this.” Death in cartoons? No! Nowadays, it’s a rather common occurrence. Strangely, after Bambi came out, Walt Disney’s single-story animated films seemed to lay off on main character deaths. Lady and the Tramp almost killed off elderly bloodhound trusty during the climax, but Peggy Lee insisted that he lived. Some villains certainly bit the bullet, such as Maleficent.

Sometimes it’s written that Walt lost his ambitious spark after the failure of Fantasia, how he was told that he got ahead of himself and did something that he clearly had no right to make. As if Walt felt that maybe animation had to “know its place,” or that he had to. His live-action movies in the 1950s were rougher than his then-contemporary animated releases, though he still didn’t shy away from harsher elements in thos films. Cinderella does have many emotional moments and is a story about psychological abuse, Lady and the Tramp has some scares along with the more adult class theme subtly woven into the story, Sleeping Beauty has a villain death and some dark moments, 101 Dalmatians puts a ton of puppies in grave danger at times… But on the whole, there’s something rather soft about Walt’s post-war films. Perhaps the criticism of Bambi‘s trip into some darker areas was what drove this? Who knows. Live-action gave us Old Yeller, but nothing animated from Disney in the 50s gave us the heartbreak of Bambi’s mother.

For a while, Disney animated films seemed to lack real bite, and character deaths were avoided. It wouldn’t be until 1981’s The Fox and the Hound, when Disney slowly crept back into showing onscreen deaths of non-villainous characters. The slow trajectory of fake deaths (Gurgi’s sacrifice in Black Cauldron, Beast’s death in Beauty and the Beast) and villain demises (The Horned King in The Black Cauldron, Ratigan and his cat in Great Mouse Detective, Sykes and his dogs in Oliver & Company) ultimately culminated in the death of Mufasa in 1994’s The Lion King. Quite something that the post-Walt studio’s version of Bambi would be the one to bring back a major character death after many years. The Lion King, unlike Bambi, was met with universal acclaim and record-breaking box office success on its initial release. Animated movies now started killing off non-villainous characters more than ever. Pixar’s done it, DreamWorks has done it, Blue Sky at times, list goes on.

Bambi eventually did find an accepting audience. Long after World War II was over, Bambi started making its money back via theatrical re-releases like most Disney animated features. Bambi‘s re-releases put it nearly on par with Snow White, and some company statistics in the 80s showed that Bambi was actually the studio’s second highest-grossing film. It was always a smash hit on video, too. The film is iconic and recognized as one of the great American cinema classics… For a good reason, too.

Bambi, like the rest of the “Big Five” before it, is like a thesis. It is an ultimate argument for animation that shows why it’s a wonderful medium. It utilizes the medium’s strengths and milks all of them. While the recent movement of computer animated movies that’s been brewing since Pixar unleashed Toy Story unto the world in 1995 wants you to believe that animation has to be an exact copy of real-life in order to be “valid,” films like Bambi say that animation’s unreal-ness is its strongest quality. Bambi isn’t trying to recreate the look of a real-life forest, it’s trying to make you “feel” the forest it’s presenting. It’s trying to make you feel for the caricatured animals. That, to me, is animation’s goal… To make you feel what’s going on, despite what’s in front of you. Like great music or a book or a poem. You can’t see music, but it can make you feel. You can’t see what’s in a book if it’s just text, but good writing makes you feel it, etc. Great animation and craftsmanship like what we see in this film makes you feel.

The film takes complete advantage of that with its aforementioned use of color, sounds, and imagery that you’re just not going to get when you walk through a real-life forest. Most animation nowadays plays it completely straight, with visuals that look just like real life, Bambi uses everything to heighten what’s already there. Good animation is like real life, but better. The trees, the grass, whatever, it doesn’t have to look exactly like it does in real life. You go to a live-action movie to see that! In an animated film, you’re here for something else, and not just funny-looking animals or cartoon characters. Bambi, like its four predecessors, slammed a fist on the table and declared that animation should do what live-action can’t. Animation should continue to do that, in an era where CGI allows live-action filmmakers to create believable things that they would’ve never gotten onscreen during Walt Disney’s lifetime. Yes, we can still marvel at the original King Kong‘s stop-motion effects or the rubber suit in the Godzilla films or the sets in various live-action movies made in the 1940s and 1950s. That was all hard work to convince audiences, but full Disney-level animation was where it was at. Cream of the crop. You had to go to animation to get the real deal, the “feel” of that stuff. Not something that was obviously fake in a live-action environment.

By the early 1990s, live-action had truly gotten there with the help of CGI. Films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, the like… We started seeing really convincing things in live-action movies. The American animation industry’s executives made the dire mistake of aggressively pushing pure animation to be like that, instead of using CGI to enhance traditional hand-drawn animation and innovate with it. Like with what we saw in Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Tarzan. For more recent examples, shorts like Paperman. That should’ve been the future for traditional animation, but executives outright killed traditional animation twice and now here we are. Every animated movie has to look like a polished variation of Toy Story. We’re getting further and further from the classics, not just Walt Disney’s work, but perhaps the purpose of animation in general… though some studios do keep that spark alive and experiment – either with 2D or CGI.

Anyways, watching Bambi was like an antidote to this generally blah year and frustrating decade for animation. Even the good films released this year were all about that photorealism, which I’ve been bored of. I want to see paintings and drawings move again, you know? Not things that look just like real life made with some ridiculous cutting edge software. Because really, what are you left with? Live-action 2.0 with some minor little flourishes here and there. The industry sneers and calls it “dated,” “old-school,” this, that… So I guess we should negate every kind of painting there is because we can achieve realism with technology? The way traditional animation is treated continues to be an embarrassment, it’s no different from scoffing at all the master artists: Vincent van Gogh, Michelangelo, Picasso? Nope, their work’s not realistic enough!

Animation executives can learn a thing or two from Walt Disney’s outdated babysitter movies. Especially films like Bambi…

Bambi is certainly the culmination of Disney Animation’s Golden Age. While a Golden Age in animation as a whole continued after the end of World War II in 1945, Disney’s animation went various different directions, but never quite equaled the sheer ambition and daring feats of the early period. Sometimes, you’d see it in bursts. After a slew of anthology films that had to be made because of the studio’s financial troubles that persisted all throughout the rest of the decade, the Disney studio slipped comfortably into a family film genre in the 1950s. Films like Cinderella and Peter Pan used minimalist art direction to compensate for the corner-cutting, but Walt still told those stories with respect for his audience. Perhaps Sleeping Beauty, released in 1959, is the belated coda of that Golden Age. Sadly, that film also failed at the box office, but what made its failure sting was the fact that there was no war going on to derail it.

Thankfully, Walt’s animated experiments were vindicated over time. Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi are revered by open-minded folks and are rightfully considered American movie treasures. Sleeping Beauty has also joined those ranks and is an iconic Disney feature. While some writers and film reporters may still not understand the early Walt films and write them off as children’s fluff, those who do keep their legacy going. A lot of these films are in the National Film Registry, and it certainly ain’t because of “nostalgia.” If so, then every other old movie would be in there because of that.

Bambi will continue to thrill for generations because of not only its lovely animation and breathtaking art direction, but its unconventional approach to storytelling that still seems against the norm today.

Happy 75th Anniversary…