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.

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.”

"This is a species of the sublime for which the sight of the boundless prairies of the interior of North America is renowned." Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation. Section 39, p. 204.