Bambi
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- This article is about the 1942 Walt Disney film. For other uses, see Bambi (disambiguation).
Plot
The story of the natural life cycle - birth, death and re-birth - is the true plot of the film. It is a case study in the very basics of life: the ‘doe-eyed’ innocence of childhood; parental love; discovering and learning about the world around us (both its beauty and its danger); loss and grief; developing friendships; loyalty; balancing risk and need; growing toward independence; being at one and in harmony with nature; and romantic love.
Like the majority of Walt Disney's feature-length animated narratives, Bambi embraces both joy and tragedy. Bambi is a movie that alternates frequently between these two extremes, with the one typically being used to set up the other. For instance, the joy of Bambi's first walk through the forest is interrupted by a frightening thunderstorm. His first visit to the meadow is joyful until it is interrupted by hunters who fire upon Bambi and his mother and father.
The seminal scene in the movie involves Bambi's mother and her death at the hands of off-screen hunters. In the sequence, the audience sees the joy/tragedy motif used again. The scene is set in late winter, and Bambi and his mother struggle to find food as mournful music plays. Joy is felt as they discover a patch of new grass, signaling the arrival of Spring, and joyful music is heard on the soundtrack. As they feast, the mood changes again, and we hear Man approach off-screen, represented only by his theme music (a low, three-note motif). Bambi's mother suddenly catches Man's scent, and orders her child to run, but she is too late. As they flee across the snow field, a shot rings out. The camera stays with young Bambi as he runs through the forest, finally stopping to catch his breath. He notices at this time (as does the audience) that his mother is nowhere to be seen.
In a series of heartbreaking dissolves, Bambi wanders desperately through the forest calling for her, but no answer comes. Bambi is startled by the sudden appearance of his father, the Great Prince, who tells him that his mother cannot be with him any more. Bambi casts his head to the ground, and when he lifts it again, the audiences see that he is crying, realizing what has happened. Bambi follows his father into the forest, taking one last look back as he leaves his childhood and innocence behind.
The movie then skips forward in time to the spring, when Bambi, Thumper, Flower, and Faline are all seen having grown up to adulthood. They become "twitterpated" over potential mates. Bambi and Faline become a couple, however their happiness is threatened by Ronno, a buck who is himself after Faline. He fights with Bambi and at first seems to have the upper hand until Bambi somehow manages to wound Ronno in his shoulder and throw him from the clifftop on which they were fighting. Ronno falls from the cliff and into the river, from which he is not seen again.
Man enters the forest again, and is responsible for a forest fire that sends all the life in the forest running for refuge in a river. Bambi and his father barely escape.
The film ends with the birth of Bambi and Faline's two fawns.
The death of Bambi's mother is one of the most famous moments in American film history, a moment so upsetting to certain children that they had to be carried screaming out of the theater during Bambi's numerous theatrical presentations. For this reason, and because of the horror and violence of the climactic hunting/forest fire sequence, many critics question the suitability of Bambi as a film appropriate for very young audiences. When one takes Bambi together with the other Disney feature films created during the same period of the early 40's, such as the dark Pinocchio, the powerful Fantasia, and the serious Victory Through Air Power, one can see an attempt by Walt Disney to produce films pushing against the stereotype of Disney animation being "children's films".
Bambi II, the midquel, takes place between the death of Bambi's mother and the time he matures. It differs from Bambi in that it is perhaps not as strong an environmental film. However, fans say that the movie more than makes up for that with its emotional depth of meaning.
Controversy
On September 1, 1998, then US Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt criticized the movie Bambi for propagating the idea that the best way to manage the forest resources within the U.S. was to fight forest fires. [link] Wildlife Magazine points out that controlled burning is now recognized as beneficial and that forest animals, such as Bambi, simply move out of the way of forest fires and, in general, are not killed by them. Both former Secretary Babbit and Wildlife Magazine say that natural wild fires helps forests to regrow. The U.S. Forest Service once used Bambi with limited permission from Disney as their charismatic anti-fire mascot before they developed the now-famous Smokey the Bear. [link] [link]Some viewers were surprised or shocked about Bambi and Faline becoming mates because in related literature Bambi's mother said that Faline's mother, Eena, was Bambi's aunt. This would make Bambi and Faline cousins. Other fans believed that Eena was not actually Bambi's aunt genetically, but rather an "honorary aunt" in the way some kids will call an unrelated older male friend "Uncle" So-and-so.
History
Re-release schedule and home video
Bambi was released in theaters in 1942, during World War II and was Disney's fifth full length animated film. It was an advance over the previous movies in sophistication of the animation, due to the experience gained in character animation at the Disney studio. The famous art direction of Bambi, which suggests emotion and the feeling of a forest rather than depicting a real forest, was due to the influence of Tyrus Wong, a former painter who provided eastern and painterly influence to the backgrounds. Bambi was re-released to theaters on 1947, 1957, 1966, 1975, 1982, and 1988. It was released on VHS video in 1989 (The Classics version), 1997 (Masterpiece Collection version) and remastered and restored for the March 1, 2005 Platinum Edition DVD.[link]Bambi theatrical release history
- August 8, 1942 (London premiere)
- August 13, 1942 (New York City, New York release)
- August 21, 1942 (USA release)
- December 25, 1947
- July 3, 1957
- March 25, 1966
- June 20, 1975
- June 4, 1982
- July 15, 1988
Recycled animation from Bambi in other films
Animation from Bambi has been reused in a lot of other Disney films, usually of birds, leaves and generic woodland footage. For example, one scene in The Fox and the Hound reused footage of the animals running from the rain in Bambi's "Little April Shower" sequence. The most reused footage from Bambi was the few seconds of Bambi's mother looking up from eating grass just before she is killed by the hunter. This footage has been used in hunting scenes in The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book. It is also featured in The Rescuers during the song "Someone's Waiting For You" and in the opening scene of Beauty and the Beast. Even a later Donald Duck short featured Bambi and his mother. They are drinking from a stream and then a bunch of garbage floats past them in the stream and Bambi's mother says to him calmly, "Man is in the forest. Let's dig out." They then leave.Trivia
- The use of implied violence by an unseen threat, expressed solely through music (a low, simple, repeating musical motif), were powerful psychological techniques Steven Spielberg later famously adopted in Jaws (1975).
- In a recent interview to Newsweek magazine, Spielberg says he that considers Bambi the biggest crying movie of all time. "When I was a kid, I would actually get up in the middle of the night and make sure my parents were still alive." [link]
- The off-screen character of "Man" has been named one of the 100 Greatest Screen Villains by the American Film Institute. [link]
- In 1993, the producers at Warner Bros. Animation made a parody of this element on one of their Animaniacs episodes, a Slappy Squirrel segment entitled "Bumbie's Mom." In it, Slappy and her nephew Skippy go see the movie "Bumbie," which is a direct parody of Bambi, down to a Thumper-like rabbit who bumps his buttocks (according to Slappy, this is because he "ate too much sugar"). However, when Bumbie's mother gets shot offscreen, like the original film, Skippy bursts into tears. The forest fire scene is also parodied, also scaring Skippy and making him cry harder. Slappy winds up pulling the sobbing Skippy out of the theater, and then they go to visit the actress (a female elderly deer), where Skippy learns that the deer playing Bumbie's mom was not really killed.[link]
- In Kingdom Hearts, a popular video game created by Squaresoft and Disney, Bambi makes an appearance as a Summon creature who runs around and drops items beneficial to the party.
- Before Thumper's name was finalized, he was referred to as "Bobo" in some sketches.
- In the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever two female villains are named Bambi and Thumper. (Ian Fleming's reference)
- In the original novel, Faline had a twin brother named "Gobo". Along with Gobo, Ronno had a friend called "Karus". There was also a doe named "Marena" and an old doe called "Nettla" who takes care of Bambi after his mother dies.
- Saturday Night Live's TV Funhouse segment, used Bambi as a means to lampoon Disney's usage of older properties for new direct-to-video sequels in the form of Bambi 2002 as well as Disney's standard of pulling off their movies from retail and putting them in the Disney vault. Of course, being TV Funhouse, the entire segment consists of rather absurd sequences involving a rapping Bambi, terrorists, Jared Fogle, and the New York Yankees to name a few.
- Although hunters are never seen in the film, the ominous music that sometimes plays in the film clues the audience that the hunters are stalking nearby.
- Some Disney fans suggest that Gaston in Beauty and the Beast was the hunter who shot Bambi's mother because a doe's head, believed to be that of Bambi's mother, mounted on the wall of the tavern during the musical number "Gaston". Other fans discredit this idea by pointing out that Bambi clearly takes place in North America, whereas Beauty and The Beast is clearly in France. In any case, it is in fact a truth that the exact same animation of Bambi's mother just before she is shot is used in the beginning sequence of Beauty and the Beast.
- Bambi is the second Disney animation feature to be set in present day (1942), Dumbo being the first.
- During the scene where the animals collect on the island during the forest fire in the original Bambi, there is a raccoon seen grooming its young, as another raccoon approaches with more young, the previous baby raccoon being licked disappears off screen, even though the grooming parent issues two licks even after it has disappeared.
- Some hunting magazines, incl. Field and Stream have referred to environmentalists and certain "animal rights groups", such as PeTA as "Bambi Freaks", worse because his mother is shot in the beginning of the film and he is shot at in the film during hunting season, and this has caused people to state that "They're killing Bambi !!" and worse, ticking off hunters every hunting season.
Titles in different languages
- Bulgarian: Бамби
- Cantonese Chinese: 小鹿斑比 (Early title used 班 instead of 斑) ("Little Deer Bambi")
- Croatian: Bambi
- Czech: Bambi
- Danish: Bambi
- Dutch: Bambi
- Estonian: Bambi
- Finnish: Bambi
- French: Bambi
- German: Bambi
- Greek: Μπάμπι
- Hebrew: במבי
- Hungarian: Bambi
- Icelandic: Bambi
- Italian: Bambi
- Japanese: バンビ (Bambi)
- Korean (South Korea): 밤비 (Bambi)
- Mandarin Chinese: 小鹿斑比
- Norwegian: Bambi
- Polish: Bambi
- Portuguese: Bambi
- Romanian: Bambi
- Russian: Бэмби
- Serbian: Bаmbi
- Slovakian (Slovakia): Bambi
- Spanish: Bambi
- Swedish: Bambi, storskogens prins (also known as Bambi)
- Turkish: Bambi
Voice cast
| Actor | Role(s) |
|---|---|
| Bobby Stewart | Baby Bambi |
| Donnie Dunagan | Young Bambi |
| Hardie Albright | Adolescent Bambi |
| John Sutherland | Adult Bambi |
| Paula Winslowe | Bambi's Mother and Pheasant |
| Peter Behn | Young Thumper |
| Tim Davis | Adolescent Thumper, Adolescent Flower |
| Sam Edwards | Adult Thumper |
| Stan Alexander | Young Flower |
| Sterling Holloway | Adult Flower |
| Will Wright | Friend Owl |
| Cammie King | Young Faline |
| Ann Gillis | Adult Faline |
| Fred Shields | Great Prince of the Forest |
| Thelma Boardman | Girl Bunny, Quail Mother and Frightened Pheasant |
| Mary Lansing | Aunt Ena, Mrs. Possum, Pheasant |
| Margaret Lee | Mrs. Rabbit |
| Otis Harlan | Mr. Mole |
| Marion Darlington | Bird calls |
| Clarence Nash | Bullfrog |
See also
References
- ["AFI's 100 YEARS...100 Heroes & Villans"] American Film Institute, n.d., Retrieved May 11, 2006.
- ["Oscar Roundtable: Prize Fighters"] By David Ansen and Sean Smith, "Newsweek", February 6, 2006, retrieved April 29, 2006.
- Spoofed by "Cartoons Gone Bad" http://cartoons-gone-bad.smackjeeves.com/. Thamper is an Thumper spoof
- ["Washington Talk: Breifing; Elks, Parks and Bambi"] By Jeff Gerth and Philip Shabecoff, "The New York Times", March 6, 1989, retrieved April 29, 2006.
- Barrier, Michael, Graham Webb, and Hames Ware. "The Moving Drawing Speaks." Funnyworld #18, Summer 1978. pp.21.
- Babbit, Burce. [Urges California Leaders to Help 'Fight Fire With Fire.'"] US Dept. of Interior. Washington: GPO, 1998
- Stewart, Doug (Jun/Jul 2002, vol. 40 no. 4) [of Life"]. National Wildlife Federation
- [Wars."] Director Kirk Wolfinger. Performers: Matt Snider, Neil Sampson, Bruce Babbit. Nova. May 7, 2002
External links
- [Bambi Special Edition DVD Home Page]
- [Donnie Dunagan's Website: Bambi Gallery]
- [Classic Films Review - Bambi at booksmusicfilmstv.com]
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