Disney Rewatch: Bambi

[osprey_archer]

Perhaps surprisingly, given how many Disney movies frightened me as a child, I always rather liked Bambi. Possibly the fact that Bambi’s mother died off screen made it less horrifying; or maybe the fact that Thumper was my favorite character distracted me from everything else.

I particularly liked Thumper’s line about the clover - when he tells Bambi just to eat the clover heads, and his mother admonishes him to repeat his father’s advice: “‘Eating greens is a special treat, It makes long ears and great big feet. But it sure is awful stuff to eat.’” Then Thumper confides to Bambi, “I made that last part up myself.”

What else to say about Bambi? The animation in this movie is just gorgeous. A lot of the changing seasons sequences provide showcases for virtuoso displays of animation skill: the colorful leaves swirling on the wind or the rain dripping off the leaves into the pool below. My favorite scene for purely beautiful animation is the part where Bambi and his mother go to the meadow, which is rendered in soft misty watercolors that make the meadow look vast and beautiful… and also just a little forbidding.

Next up: Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, which my library has on a disc as a double feature… but there’s only one copy and someone else has it, so the Disney rewatch may be on hold for a while.

***

And now I'm off for a wedding, and then a few days to hike and read! I was hoping to finish Part 2 of Honeytrap before I go (I'll be leaving my computer behind and taking a break from writing) but it looks like that won't happen. I do have the next bit all ready to post when I get back on Tuesday, though. We'll be getting yet more Christmas (why is there so much Christmas? I don't know), with bonus discussion of Stalin.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Bambi is something I experienced as a kid not from the film but from a record that came with a story booklet with illustrations that were stills from the movie. We'd put the record on the record player, then sit and listen, turning the pages of the story book. It had the songs, plus some of the dialogue, and the rest was narration.

I loved it... and when we were in ... fourth grade, I want to say? I got to be Faline in a class play. But did the play ever actually **happen**? I can remember the rehearsals but not the performance.

I also remember reading Bambi's Children, and then--after reading Bambi's Children--reading Bambi. But that was years later.

Enjoy the wedding and hiking!

[osprey_archer]

Surely they couldn't have you rehearse without putting on the play! That just seems cruel.

I know that Bambi was a book before it was a Disney movie, but I don't recall ever seeing that book in the wild. How did you like it?

[asakiyume]

I liked the sequel, which I read first, better. The original was hampered by the fact that my mind had DISNEY MOVIE stamped all over it, and the story was not that story.

Bambi's Children features twin baby deer who then grow up and includes problems like one of them being hurt and taken care of by humans and so losing the natural fear of humans (that might have been another deer, not one of the twins, though).

The one thing I remember about Bambi, which affected religiously-inclined-but-unchurched childhood-me a lot, was when Bambi and someone--maybe his father--find a dead hunter, and one or the other of them remarks in awe that there is a force even more powerful than MAN before which even MAN is humbled. (I recall this special treatment of the word "man" but it might not have been both caps and italics... it might have been just one or the other)

[osprey_archer]

The word MAN is like that in the movie, too. Not that it pops up on screen or anything, but they say it with such weight that you can HEAR the capital letters.

[anelith]

It's funny how a kid reacts differently from an adult. As a child I thought the fire was the most terrifying thing -- I didn't note his mother's death as something that emotional. Now as an adult it seems like that's the saddest thing in the world.

[osprey_archer]

I think it must have been because Bambi's mother's death happened offscreen, because I definitely found Mufasa's death in The Lion King sad - or Little Foot's mother's death in The Land before Time. But Bambi's mom just sort of disappeared and I was like ??? and then suddenly it's springtime and the courting song is happening so whatevs, I guess!