Bambi 1: The Medium

For my fifth Christmas, this would be Christmas of 1968, my parents gave me and my older sister an LP of the sound-track of Bambi. A few days later, my Mom put the record in the player so we could listen. The album came with a large picture book, and we kids flipped through the pages, wide-eyed, as we followed the sound. We heard the opening chorus of “Love is a song that never ends” and later the “Drip, drip, drop, little April showers…” We heard the stags charging through the meadow and followed along flipping through the pictures. And then we heard the shotgun fire, and young Bambi calling out “Mother!” “Mother!” My sister and I wailed. We stopped only to catch our breath, and then we wailed some more. We shut off the record player and tried to comfort ourselves. Dad returned from a long hard day at work a short-time later. He was disgusted that a Christmas gift could send his children into such despair and his home into such chaos. Too late did he learn that Bambi, of all things, was not appropriate for children. Or rather, as children, maybe especially as children, we knew exactly what Bambi was saying.

Now, as an adult, I want to look at how the animators at the Walt Disney Studios constructed the movie to see (1) what they intended to say, (2) what the movie actually says, (3) whether I (still) consider it persuasive, and finally (4) what criticisms or alternatives I might offer.

Disney loosely based Bambi and the Great Prince of the Forest on a book by Fritz Salten, Bambi: A Forest Life. The different mediums both required and allowed the film-makers to tell the story in a different way. The message is more than the medium, however. Disney did not shy away from a creative reworking of the material, such that the two Bambies tell different stories.

The change in mediums does partially determine Disney’s message. Salten’s book, literally composed of words, carries the story through descriptions and through dialogue. Disney’s film, by contrast, “is an essentially silent movie: a wordless, rhythmical ballet performed to an orchestral accompaniment.”

The Silver Anniversary edition of Bambi gives viewers access to comments made in the planning meetings for the film. Those comments show Disney animators keen to push the envelope of their current understanding of an animated motion picture.

The animators applied lessons learned from previous Disney projects. Prior to Disney cartoons could be only cute and funny. Their aesthetic required that they be short, unrealistic comedies. Extreme forms of violence become funny when animated as a cartoon. (Itchy and Scratchy illustrate this principle on The Simpsons.) Snow White (1937) and Pinocchio (1940) had already enabled viewers to experience real beauty in a cartoon. Likewise, Disney found that a strong villain on a big screen with a good script, animation, and music allowed a cartoon to portend even tragedy. With Fantasia (1940) the studio tried to match the depth and power of Bach, Tchaikovsky, Dukas, Stravinsky, Beethoven, and Shubert with animation on the big screen. They learned the power of music as a tool different from either dialogue or animation.

They learned the difference between “what is felt” and “what is seen.” They dropped as much dialogue as possible out of the film. Likewise, they made judicious choices on what they would communicate through music rather than animation. In Bambi, two “characters” and one event directly benefit from these previous projects.

Bambi opens with a pan of a dark, sometimes out of focus, multi-plane shot of the forest. The animators understand that the forest is itself a character in this story, and they want it to be “mysterious,” merely hinted at; they want it to be felt rather than seen.

The second character to be felt but not seen is Man. The Disney editors took every image of individual people out of the final version. (Only a shot of a distant hunting camp remains.) Instead of showing some individual, the film indicates the presence of Man “by ominous, lurching music.”

The death of Bambi’s mother is the event that happens entirely off-screen. We know she died because we heard the music, we heard the shot, and we hear Bambi’s cries of “Mother!” The old stag’s “Your mother cannot be with you anymore” merely confirms what we already know. The animators knew they were making the scene more powerful by not showing Bambi’s mother falling. They knew they were “really gonna hit them [the viewers] hard.”