Bambi 2: Message

These changes made possible or necessary by the change in medium already have the ability to transform the story. Disney studios also made other alterations that make Satlen’s Bambi and Disney’s Bambi into different, even competing, stories.

Salten’s story, written in the aftermath of the Great War, takes death as its central theme. Nature is “red in tooth and claw.” Predators kill and eat, prey are killed and eaten. The animals, the plants, and even the leaves of trees anxiously anticipate their own deaths, and they talk about their impending demise. While humans, called “Him,” seem to be either a god or devil, He too dies, as Bambi sees at the end. Bambi voices the theological moral of the story: “There is Another who is over us all, over us and over Him [Man].” Man and the Forest are reconciled within the circle of life and death beneath the care of One who is above it.

Disney’s Bambi, produced during the preparations for and beginning of the Second World War, presents Nature as a calm and peaceful harmony (except for the scene in the winter where Bambi’s mother feeds him bark off of the trees.) All of the animals are friends; the crotchety owl looks down from his perch with grandfatherly affection on the gathering of rabbits and mice. As the story editor Perce Pearce says in a planning meeting: “There’s nobody swooping down and eating someone else….” In the realm of nature, there is no death, only birth and life. Disney isolates and focuses Death onto one character, Man. Pearce, again: “their one common enemy is Man. That’s the conflict there—and keep it simple.” Simple, indeed. Death disappears from Nature. What had been a death scene in Salten, the two falling leaves, becomes the beautiful passing of autumn into winter. All dialogue about anxiety in the face of death disappears, and in its place … music. And Man is always the devil, never a god. In contrast with Salten, Disney offers no resolution of the conflict between Man and Nature, Death and Life. “It is about surviving in the forest.” This is part of the reason Roger Ebert describes Disney’s Bambi as “a parable of … nihilism, and despair”; it paints reality as a “world of death and violence.”

My five-year-old reaction was appropriate after all.