The story of Bambi is a fairly typical coming of age narrative, so I will try to move swiftly through it to the meat. Bambi is a truly adorable fawn born the “prince of the forest”. He spends his earliest life with his mother then making friends with other woodland critters such as the rabbit Thumper and a skunk Bambi names Flowers. They explore the woods together and teach each other, but primarily Bambi, the ways of things. Then Bambi is taught the dangers of the open meadow by his mother and meets a fellow fawn, Faline. During his first winter Bambi and his mother venture to the meadow to find food when humans are heard and they flee together. A shot is heard but Bambi makes it home safely, not realising that his mother has died. He searches for her for a time before his father, named Great Prince by the subtitles, finds him and takes him away. Springtime brings with it a seemingly matured Bambi who is reintroduced to all his childhood friends now they are all adults. They are told about love, swear off it, then all immediately fall for the first animal of their species they see who is the opposite sex. Bambi fights a fairly brutal match against another stag over an adult Faline and is victorious. They have a romantic evening and “spend the night together” before Bambi is roused by something and ventures to the edge of the forest where he finds his father. Humans have come back to the forest and creatures flee from them, but many are shot. Faline awakes and is surprised by Bambi’s absence so flees alone, Bambi returns to fetch her to safety but misses her. They find each other but have to fight off a pack of hunting dogs, after he is victorious over the dogs by catching them in a landslide Bambi leaps across a canyon gap but is shot in midair. The hunter’s recklessly abandoned camp causes a forest fire and Bambi is only able to flee it thanks to the Great Prince finding him and managing to rouse him enough to flee. The animals, including Faline, of the forest all shelter on an island in the middle of a river. The film ends with all of our secondary youthful characters having had children, before we find Faline has birthed twins, the camera pans up to see the Great Prince, and the fully grown Bambi beside him, watching over the young family. The Great Prince turns and walks away whilst Bambi stays.
The wonderful animation and generally stunning visuals of Bambi do a lot of the heavy lifting on the storytelling that is being done. Where I felt that Dumbo lost a lot of clarity by having its protagonist stay silent the whole film, and have another character motor mouth for both of them, Bambi is not silent, just quiet. This allows him to still provide insight into his feelings that we can’t see, but the absence of a Timothy analogue is what helps the most here. Scenes are able to just breathe without a character needing to talk over them, and because of this the visuals are able to bring out the emotions and themes of this film. The joy in the early Summer/Winter sections are beautifully captured, with the adorable baby animals (seriously my notes contain the words “x is too cute, I’ll die” too often) frolicing around the forest in Summer, then skating across ice and playing in the snow. When Bambi’s mother is showing him the meadow she walks out first to try to confirm it’s safe, and the background is largely a gradient of smokey greys that perfectly capture the tension, as well as foreshadow what she is afraid of. Every time the hunters are at work the smokey grey backgrounds return, and finally the foreshadowing is completed when the smoke becomes literal as the forest burns because of the hunter’s lack of care. The shots of the Great Prince on the hill, then the final shot where he is joined by a matching Bambi also communicate effectively the sense of pride and remote care. The fight scene between the bucks is often drawn in a more rough and unfinished style with a much reduced colour palette which extremely effectively enhances the brutality of the violence as they strive to be the one to court Faline. Lastly for this section, as Bambi hunts for his mother that the audience knows is dead, the framing is almost dutch angles, with us seeing Bambi in extremely severe angles obscured by trees and distance. Overall the animation is just clearer in what it is trying to do, and better at achieving the goal.
The themes of Bambi are maybe where the film falters a little, as they are a little muddled in some ways, but even this flaw depends on which theme you think is primary. At the time, and even today, it seems that people are quick to point out that Bambi isn’t anti-hunting. This argument, to me, seems fairly ridiculous. The film makes humanity such an oppressively destructive force despite never being seen on screen. The grief of the infant fawn is over his mother being killed by hunters. The panic and fear of the small meadow birds is about being shot by hunters. The pack of dogs that nearly kill both Faline and Bambi are trained and set loose by hunters. The forest fire is started from the hunters’ camp. The beautiful forest backgrounds fade whenever there is even a threat from them. I think that any argument that this film is not anti-hunting is searching for evidence where very little exists. Truly the only weakness of this theme is that while the emotional grief and fear is felt, the film is oddly bloodless. While this works in the fight over Faline, the stylisation makes the scene feel brutal without needing obvious wounds, when Bambi is literally buried beneath a pack of dogs or is ostensibly shot the lack of any wound or blood can make the challenge feel less real. It especially muddles the moment where Bambi is shot, a scene that should be completely filled with tension, because the audience needs to assume that the deer was hit. There is no obvious impact and Bambi simply cannot stand. Lowering the visual brutality of the hunters to less than what is given to another member of Bambi’s species doesn’t equate to being not anti-hunting, but it does weaken the overall impact of some of the otherwise strongest scenes in the film. If one assumes that the anti-hunting theme is primary then the themes are a little weak. I believe that the primary theme is actually the circle of life. Bambi begins and ends with a
“prince of the forest” having an heir born and being cooed over by the forest creatures. It shows the coming of age of one and the cycles of violence and life that occupies creatures' lives. Within this the violence of humanity is still an unwelcome and disruptive force that is applied from the outside, but the weakness of parts of the secondary theme make more sense from within this overall message.
Finally I just want to mention a few things that I noticed but didn’t fit well into my analysis so far. First the transition songs were quite good, and the first non-diegetic (or at least not sung by a character) songs in this run that I didn’t mind, although the transition from Bambi mourning his mother to a very upbeat song about Spring was a little too jarring. I was reminded of how (many years later) Frozen was able to better handle the transition from the bleak despair of the end of Do You Wanna Build A Snowman to the Coronation Day and The First Time in Forever atmosphere by including a piece of transition music that’s only a minute long. Although this isn’t perfect in Frozen (in my opinion that transition needed another 30-60 seconds) the emotional whiplash in Bambi was significantly worse and I couldn’t leave it unmentioned. The voice acting for the child animals was surprisingly solid, but I was extremely happy when Thumper transitioned to his adult voice. The child did a good job being annoying, but that’s not always great as a viewer.
Bambi was a film I had not seen much as a child, and did not have fond memories of. I remembered it being a little boring and not having much beyond a famous death. I was extremely pleasantly surprised to discover what I think is the most successfully deep of Disney’s first five theatrical releases. The characters and themes remain relevant today, and this film feels like it wants me to remember it as more than entertainment the most, other than Fantasia. I enjoyed it thoroughly and am glad that I have revisited it as an adult.
Now for a scheduling note, the next six films are all outside the traditional idea of a “Disney Animated Feature” as they are all compilations of shorter stories, some with mixed in live action footage. All this to say I may cover more than one at a time to try to get through these a little more swiftly and get back to the traditional Disney fare. Next week will be the first of the package films, Saludos Amigos (and maybe its sequel The Three Caballeros if I can fit it in).
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