Bambi
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- This article is about the 1942 Walt Disney film. For other uses, see Bambi (disambiguation).
| Bambi | |
|---|---|
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| Directed by | David D. Hand |
| Produced by | Walt Disney |
| Written by | Felix Salten (novel) Larry Morey (story adaptation) Perce Pearce (story direction) Gustaf Tenggren (illustration) |
| Starring | Bobby Stewart Donnie Dunagan Hardie Albright John Sutherland Paula Winslowe Peter Behn Tim Davis Sam Edwards Will Wright Cammie King Ann Gillis Fred Shields Stan Alexander Sterling Holloway |
| Distributed by | Rated RKO Radio Pictures |
| Release date(s) | August 13, 1942 |
| Running time | 70 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | (unknown) |
| Followed by | Bambi II (2006) |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Bambi is a 1942 animated feature produced by Walt Disney Productions and originally released to theatres by Rated RKO Radio Pictures on August 13, 1942. The fifth animated feature in the Disney animated features canon, the film is based on the 1923 book Bambi, A Life in the Woods by Austrian author Felix Salten. The main characters are Bambi, the young prince of the forest, his parents (the Great Prince of the forest and his unnamed mother), and his friends Thumper (a rabbit), Flower (a skunk), and his childhood friend and future mate, Faline (also a deer). For the movie, Disney took the liberty of changing Bambi's species into a white-tailed deer to visually emphasize him against the colored backgrounds, since he is a roe deer in the book.
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[edit] 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.
The pivotal scene in the movie involves Bambi's mother and her death at the hands of off-screen poachers. 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, shots ring 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 informs 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 (very abruptly) 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, with Bambi standing proudly at the top of the mountain, looking down at them proudly as his father did at his own birth.
The death of Bambi's mother is one of the most famous moments in American film history[citation needed], a moment so upsetting to certain children that they had to be carried screaming out of the theater during Bambi's numerous theatrical presentations.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed] 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". Nonetheless, it was more than forty years before Disney featured the death of a parent in the form of Tod's mom in the Fox and the Hound, and more than fifty years before they featured the death of a main character who wasn't a villain (Mufasa in The Lion King).
[edit] Pre-production
Walt Disney early in the preparation for this animated film decided to go to enormous lenghts to achieve realistic detail. The artists heard lectures from animal experts, and visited the Los Angeles Zoo [1]. A pair of fawns [of course named Bambi and Feline] were shipped from the Baxter State Park in Maine to the studio so that the artists could see first-hand the movement of these animals. The source of these fawns, from the Eastern United States, was the impetus for the transformation of Felix Salton's roe deer to white-tailed deer [2]. The background of the film was also the Eastern woodlands - one of the earliest and best known artists for the Disney studio, Maurice "Jake" Day spent several weeks in the Maine woods, sketching and photographing deer, fawns, and the surrounding wilderness areas [3].
[edit] History
[edit] Release dates
[edit] United States |
[edit] International
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[edit] 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.[1] The Platinum Edition DVD went on moratorium on January 31, 2007. [2]
[edit] Recycled animation from Bambi in other films
Animation from Bambi has been reused in several other Disney films, especially footage of birds, leaves and generic woodland. 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 are 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 latter-day 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.
[edit] Trivia
- 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 (see leitmotif). The use of implied violence by an unseen threat, expressed solely through music (a low, simple, repeating musical motif), was a powerful psychological technique later adopted by Steven Spielberg in Jaws (1975). George Lucas somewhat alluded to this technique in The Empire Strikes Back, showing only short, fragmented shots of the Wampa ice monster.
- In a recent interview to Newsweek magazine, Steven Spielberg says that he 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." [3]
- The off-screen character of "Man" has been named twentieth of the 50 Greatest Screen Villains by the American Film Institute. [4]
- 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.
- In Kingdom Hearts, a popular video game created by Square-Enix 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. In a side-plot omitted from the Disney film, Gobo is captured by humans as a fawn and raised as a pet. When he returns, he is careless and ill-adapted to life in the wild, and he dies when he mistakenly approaches a hunter.
- 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. [5]
- 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. This was a registration error, later digitally corrected on the 2005 DVD release.
- Some hunting magazines have used this title character as a means of criticizing the environmentalists, especially PeTA and other "animal rights" groups, anti-hunting groups, calling them "Bambi Freaks" and worse. They have implied that this film is "pro-animal rights", anti-hunting.
- Bambi was Walt Disney's favorite film.
- There are asteroids named 15845 Bambi and 16626 Thumper.
- Felix Salten's 1923 novel 'Bambi' was translated from the German in 1928 by Whittaker Chambers.
- In an early draft of the script of Who Framed Roger Rabbit the film's villain was revealed to be the hunter who killed Bambi's mother. In the movie, this was removed in response to the sad reaction from children and adults to her death.
- A character in Mark Z. Danielewski's book "House of Leaves" is a stripper known only as "Thumper" because of the tattoo of a rabbit on her pelvis, in a reference to the character in Bambi.
- In The Simpsons episode "Tales from the Public Domain", Homer reads the family the story of Joan of Arc, but when Joan is burnt at the stake, Lisa asks, "She wasn't really killed, was she?" But Marge runs in and "reads" the rest of the story, to spare her from the truth. "Just then, Sir Lancelot rode up on a white horse and saved Joan of Arc! They got married and lived in a spaceship! The end." Marge tore the page out, ate it, and said, "Well, at least it's easier to chew than that Bambi video."
- Faline's name was mispronounced throughout the entire movie. The name, taken from a book written in German by an Austrian author, should have been pronounced "fa-LEE-nuh" but instead was pronounced "fuh-LEEN" by the American voice actors, an error continued in Bambi II.
- In DC Comics 1989 Graphic Novel, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, Bruce Wayne's parents are killed after leaving a showing of Bambi in the middle due to Bruce's crying. His mother is upset and threatens to leave him if he doesn't start acting like a grown up.
[edit] Soundtrack Listing
- Main Title (Love Is A Song)
- Morning In The Woods/The Young Prince/Learning To Walk
- Exploring/Say Bird/Flower
- Little April Shower
- The Meadow/Bambi Sees Faline/Bambi Gets Annoyed
- Gallop Of The Stags/The Great Prince Of The Forest/Man
- Autumn/The First Snow/Fun On The Ice
- The End Of Winter/New Spring Grass/Tragedy In The Meadow
- Wintery Winds
- Let's Sing A Gay Little Spring Song
- It Could Even Happen To Flower
- Bambi Gets Twitterpated/Stag Fight
- Looking For Romance (I Bring You A Song)
- Man Returns
- Fire/Reunion/Finale
- Rain Drops (Demo Recording)
- Bonus Interview - Introduced By Richard Kiley: Walt Disney
- Bonus Interview - Introduced By Richard Kiley: Ollie Johnston And Frank Thomas
- Bonus Interview - Introduced By Richard Kiley: Henry Mancini
The original 1942 release indcluded 2 additional songs (that were subsequently removed)[4]: "Twitterpated" (Based on Friend Owl's lecture on the amorous effects of spring) Written by Helen Bliss, Robert Sour and Henry Manners
"Thumper Song" Written by Helen Bliss, Robert Sour and Henry Manners
[edit] 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 |
[edit] Supervising Animators
[edit] Notes
- ^ Walt Disney Collection: Walt's Masterworks - Bambi http://disney.go.com/disneyatoz/familymuseum/collection/masterworks/bambi/index.html
- ^ The Trouble with Bambi: Walt Disney's Bambi and the American Vision of Nature by Ralph H. Lutts: From 'Forest and Conservation History' 36 (October 1992)
- ^ Maurice E. Day, Animator, 90; Drew Deer for Movie 'Bambi': Obituary in the New York Times, published May 19, 1983)
- ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0034492/soundtrack
[edit] See also
[edit] 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. "Babbitt 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) "Fires of Life". National Wildlife Federation
- Webb, Graham (2001). The Animated Film Encyclopedia: A Complete Guide to American Shorts, Features, and Sequences, 1900-1979. McFarland and Co.. ISBN 0-7864-0728-X.
- "Fire Wars." Director Kirk Wolfinger. Performers: Matt Snider, Neil Sampson, Bruce Babbit. Nova. May 7, 2002
[edit] External links
| Preceded by Dumbo |
Walt Disney Pictures 1942 |
Succeeded by Saludos Amigos |
Categories: Articles which may contain original research | Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with large trivia sections | 1942 films | American films | Disney animated features canon | Films featuring anthropomorphic characters | Films based on children's books | Films shot in Technicolor
