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.

Midwestern Sublime 2

The non-native criticizes the central Illinois landscape not on ethical grounds – “This land is bad” – nor pragmatic grounds – “This land is useless”; the critique is aesthetic: “This land is boring.” To understand how the land places the burden of boredom on the traveler it helps to place ourselves in the position of the traveler. The traveler has been shaped by other landscapes, and she has expectations when she arrives in Illinois. She has seen Ansel Adams photographs and Hudson Bay paintings – now those are landscapes! It would seem that Illinois has nothing comparable.

To what, then, shall we compare the land of central Illinois? Many years ago I went on my first extended backpacking trip in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The trip lasted three weeks. We never entered a building by day, and we slept under tarps at night. And this Illinois boy felt nearly claustrophobic. I found it confusing to feel so hemmed in on every side when we were out of doors. Then we reached the shores of Lake Superior. I could see the horizon, and I relaxed. Illinois is not like the Rocky Mountains or the Adirondacks. It is like the sea.

The picture posted is by Larry Kanfer and is entitled, appropriately, “Tall Ships.”

Midwestern Sublime

Those of us raised on the flat plains of Illinois have heard the story too many times. Travelers from other parts of the country have seen all they need to see of the state. They have seen it through the windows of their cars travelling at seventy miles an hour on our interstate system. Those flat plains bore those passing through; they provoke dread in those coming to stay. A landscape without hills is like a sky without stars, an endless nothingness as far as the eye can see. “The towns feel like they just dropped out of the sky; there is no reason why they should be one place rather than another.” “I couldn’t live here,” says the passers-through, head wagging. “We may have made a mistake” cough the second-guessing stayers.


I usually nod in agreement, taking a kind of pride in the personal virtues which my lamenting friend must attribute to me, virtues which give me an unimaginable strength to live in this nowhere land. But my nod is a lie. I disagree. My traveling friends are blind. They travel the country, and they hope along the way to see the beauty of the earth. They find it in New England and New Mexico, in Michigan and Missisippi, and they think they should find it in central Illinois. When they do not find it, their eyes fail them. So, for my traveling friends, I will offer a few meditations on how to see central Illinois.

Richard Nelson, Reflections I

Nelson, Richard. The Island Within. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Nelson, Richard. Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Richard Nelson expresses in the form of a nature memoir the aesthetic sense of hunting. In the field of aesthetics, we call this “the sublime,” and it finds its classic definitions in Kant and Schopenhauer. Before the philosophers, though, let us allow this anthropologist-gone-native to speak.

In the first chapter of The Island Within, “The Face in a Raindrop,” Nelson has goes to the island to hunt, but he finds himself stranded by a storm. For three days, the merciless wind, the buckets of rain, the swelling sea, the enormous trees, the everyday exchange of life and death, and the intricate interconnections of all things on the island work on him. They dwarf him, they contain him, and they uphold him.

Here is the paragraph from which he draws the title of the chapter:

At this moment there must be more raindrops falling on the surface of the island that they are humans on earth, perhaps more than all the humans who ever lived. I’ve thought of raindrops as tiny and insignificant things, but against the scale of the earth itself, they’re scarcely smaller than I am. On what basis, then, can I consider myself more important? Koyukon elders say that each kind of weather, including rain, has its own spirit and consciousness. If this is true, there must be a spirit within every raindrop, as in all else that inhabits the earth. In this sense, we are two equal forms of being who stand in mutual regard. I bend down to look at a crystal droplet hanging from a hemlock needle and know my own image is trapped inside. It’s humbling to think of myself in this way. In the broader perspective of earth, I am nothing more than a face in a raindrop. p. 17

Ishmael, Book Review II

I will offer only a few observations on the book. First, a point of clarification: Ishmael paints a powerful and accessible picture, but, we ought not confuse this picture with others. Though Western, white, patriarchy provides a clear example of the taker mode of operation, takers are not identical with the West, with whites, with men, or any combination of those. Beijing, Robert Mugabe, and Margaret Thatcher do not offer an alternative to the taker mythology. Takers have made nearly the entire planet into a prison, and we humans are its occupants … all of us. Getting out of the prison is more important than redistributing privileges within the prison. The ecological revolution trumps all others.

Second, a call for elaboration: Quinn’s meditations on the first chapters of Genesis are provocative, and they could be usefully read alongside Hugh Brody’s considerations in The Other Side of Eden. Likewise, his alternative account of the history of the world contrasts nicely with the account in Hegel, Marx, Fukuyama, and Sayyid Qutb. It could be filled out by reading it alongside the works of Paul Shepherd. (I am planning to review some of Paul Shepherd’s books next.)

Third, a few critical comments: The “either / or” dichotomy (either takers or leavers) that forms the basis of the book supports its thesis as well as a bicycle at full stop supports its rider. Still, I can concede its usefulness for making the book accessible. However, our rider definitely falls over when Quinn provides only one of the two wheels; that is, he gives us the “either” without the “or.” Quinn develops the taker mythology but never gives as much attention to the leaver mythology. His leaver mythology doesn’t speak much about the gods and doesn’t really take the form of a story. This is a damning criticism in the terms the book set for itself. Instead, he frames leaver mythology in terms of biological and evolutionary laws. It is highly doubtful that this is the way leavers of various stripes would formulate their mythology.

Further, Quinn’s leaver mythology embraces the values of romanticism and democracy; species and forms of life are valued for their own sake, possess their own rights, and no group imposes its form of life on the others. This stands in tension with his evolutionary-based claim that the universe is moving toward intelligence and self-awareness, that such qualities are more complex and are presumably better or a genuine “advance.” Humans were the first to make this break-through, that other forms of life will follow and they will hail us for helping keep their futures open. Leaver mythology begins to look like a mishmash of ideas from the political left of the sixties, not from as yet unassimilated tribes in Brazil. Surely an intelligent, self-aware gorilla could offer a more significant paradigm shift than this.

Ishmael, Book Review I

Quinn, Daniel. Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. A Bantam / Turner Book, 1992. ISBN: 0553375407

Ishmael shares a genre with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; both alternate between 1) a symbolic narrative and 2) a series of straight-forward but allegedly mind-blowing lectures. I don’t know if this genre has a name.

The narrative: In Ishmael a teacher is looking for a student who wants to save the world. The narrator, Alan Lomax, is the student; the teacher, Ishmael, is a gorilla who communicates telepathically. (Yes, you read that right.) Ishmael lives in an office building, where he also conducts his classes with Mr. Lomax. Four-fifths of the way through the book he is evicted from the office building and sold to a carnival.

The lectures: Ishmael helps his student unearth the mythology / worldview / ideology of the civilized world, those he designates “takers,” and of those civilizations that “history left behind,” whom he calls “leavers.” For the takers, the gods made the world for man to rule, but man first must conquer it. When he finally conquers and rules, the world will be paradise. However, man has a tragic flaw that keeps him from fulfilling this mission. For the leavers, on the other hand, man belongs to the world. The world tends toward complexity, self-awareness, and intelligence. Man is first to achieve self-awareness, and his job is to keep the future open for other species to also advance in complexity, intelligence, and self-awareness. (Remember, this is a gorilla talking.) All can now see that human culture will crash within a few generations. From the leaver view, this is not the result of a tragic human flaw; it follows from acting out the taker mythology. Takers have not really transcended nature, but they have acted as though nature’s laws no longer apply to them. The result is a reduction in complexity and diversity of species, but also of actual and potential intelligence and self-awareness. Natural law will bring the taker experiment to a close, not, however, before the takers themselves have nearly destroyed the planet.

Ishmael, the gorilla, having taught the human all he has to teach, offering to be now his friend rather than his teacher, dies due to lack of good care in the carnival.