The husband and I agree, the kids are too young to see this one. Not sure how to handle the whole “Bambi’s Mommy is Dead” aspect.
I had forgotten how most of the advertising for this film focus on Bambi as a child. We see this young woodland creature, yet the film is really evenly divided between his youth and the beginning of his adulthood.
There is an urban legend that basically says that if you ask people if they remember the hunter shooting Bambi’s mother, they would say yes. It’s a bit of a trick really, because while man really is the villain in the film, he is never shown on screen. The scene in question, the one that people say they can remember, doesn’t even take place on screen. The camera cuts away, the shot is heard, but his mother is never seen again. I’m sure there was plenty of discussion on the matter on the part of the artists on what to show and what not to show.
I also never made the connection (the included documentary explained this) that man, in the end, is revenged by the forest fire that they started. I guess I’ll accept that. It’s a bit abstract, in my opinion.
One of the random pieces of trivia that I learned watching this film was that the child voice of Faline was performed by same actress that was Bonnie Blue Butler in the film Gone With The Wind. According to the documentary included with the version of Bambi that I watched, Cammie King Conlon didn’t continue her acting career after that point.
I also had no idea (and watching the films in order as I am now, this should not be a surprise) that Bambi was based on previously existing material. The original book was written in 1924 by a very bored insurance salesman (My husband kept making Hartford Insurance jokes through the movie every time Bambi’s father was on the scene so you can imagine the giggling after we saw that in the documentary). The author sold the rights to story to a movie producer that soon realized that the only medium that would be able to do this was animation.
Bambi was the second full length animated feature to go into production at the studios. However, the work progressed slowly, there by letting Pinocchio and Dumbo to be completed and released previous to Bambi. One of the areas of concern that the documentary pointed out was the fact that since this story is told in nature that the artists should do their very best to represent nature. Yet the storyboard team found themselves tripping over the scenery, distracting from the characters. The background and subtle expression of nature would come from one artist by the name of Tyrus Wong.
Tyrus was a Chinese born artist who specialized in landscapes. Yet he didn’t come into the Disney Studio as a background artist. Rather, he was initially hired as an in-betweener, after having been encouraged to apply for work at the studio by his wife. Some of the other artists realized his skills with landscapes and soon he was the lead background artist for Bambi. Tyrus would leave the studio shortly after the completion of Bambi, but enjoyed a long career in the industry. As far as I can tell at the time of this writing, he is still alive at one hundred one years young.
This film is also sparse on dialog, not more than a thousand words total. That fact sounds odd after you hear it and even stranger after you watch the film. I guess that’s right, considering better people than me have taken the time to count. I think that this is a roundabout complement on my part, but the characters say what they need to say and nothing more.
I think that this film is an achievement because the story is very complex and speaks to each audience differently. I don’t take the film as a conservationist centerpiece like some have. Nor do I take the film as adverse opinion of hunters. It’s the original “Circle of Life” by telling the story with the seasons as a guide. It is not a nature ballet in the traditional sense to me, rather it’s a mirror of the human experiences of unconditional love, innocence (and its loss), fear, perseverance and romance.