Did she die for nothing?
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When Sergei Eisenstein saw Bambi, he was highly impressed. The great Soviet film director, responsible for such world classics as Battleship Potemkin and Alexander Nevsky, pronounced Walt Disney’s fifth feature-length animated film “a shift towards ecstasy“, which represented “the greatness of Disney as the purest example of the application of the method of art in its very purest form”. Disney, said Eisenstein, was on a par with such master creators as DaVinci, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky.
I suspect that not even the biggest Disney superfan would go quite that far today, although Bambi, which premiered 80 years ago, is still held in high regard. And of all his films, Bambi was Walt’s favourite. In 2011, it was added to the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry, alongside Chaplin’s The Kid, Porgy and Bess and The Big Heat. Bambi, in fact, is more than a film: it’s part of our cultural fabric. Like Sherlock Holmes or Superman, you don’t need to engage with the source material to know something about it. Specifically, the crucial plot point: Bambi’s mother dies.
When I was a boy in Scotland, it was impossible to watch a Disney “classic”; they would not be released on home video until I was in high school. As a result, I knew Bambi from clips on the insipid compilation show Disney Time. Bambi was represented by the scene where Thumper pounds his foot on the forest floor; yet still I was aware that Bambi’s mother died. It was in the air, like Kryptonite, or “elementary my dear Watson”.
I was in my thirties and living in Texas by the time I finally saw the film, which I watched with my son, who was three or four at the time. It was obvious from the painterly backdrops and acutely observed movements of the deer that Disney was going for “art”, but when is his mum going to die? I wondered. And then, around halfway through, it happened: having escaped the hunters once already, and endured the harsh winter, Bambi’s mother has finally led her son to a source of food when the baddies return. Mother and son flee, a shot rings out, and Bambi is alone in a world gone silent. A stag appears before him: “Your mother can’t be with you anymore,” it says. Later, the forest burns down.
This was heavy stuff, and not just by Disney standards. I looked at my son, who had become quite upset when the “Heffalump” faced mild peril in a terrible straight-to-DVD Winnie the Pooh sequel. But the Bambi death scene was too subtle; it had gone over his head. This felt like a narrow escape, that I had dodged a conversation I didn’t want to have yet.
It’s not that I was against death in children’s cartoons. Like everyone else, I had seen many animated characters meet their demise, but these were usually “good” deaths, the kind where evil is obliterated: the villain falls into the sea, dies by the sword or plunges into molten lead. Dead parents were not uncommon either; children’s stories teem with orphans, but the parents are almost always long dead before the action begins. Those deaths are backstory; their purpose is to remove protection from the child heroes and so expose them to risk and adventure.
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Subscribe“And yet. Bambi — Bambi I still respect. I think it’s the absence at the heart of the film that gives it such power, even after 80 years. Disney knew that the grief over the loss of a parent was too vast and all-encompassing to reduce to a plot point. He could only draw a veil over it and move on.”
Possibly the reason the author still respects Bambi is because it was produced by an individual, a person with feelings and a history, and not a corporation. Therefore the presentation of death still had a human quality to it. The death was enough, then draw a veil over it. It didn’t lessen what had happened, nor did it need to be dramatised. Disney is now a machine. What do machines understand of death and being human?
Very well said.
Disney used to be Disney. So many of Disney’s movies are about non-mothers. Dumbo, Bambi, The Little Mermaid. Never thought about it until after they went nuts – WOKE.
I am in the role of the evil doer…. I am a hunter…
I think about this movie every time I enter the woods…
It’s an animated movie… but it resonates deep in side of me… going into the woods to end a life… to sustain a life
Thinking about Bambi as I pick out a deer trail… is it a Buck or a Doe. Is there a fawn with her… is she pregnant….
I don’t take a life for sport or joy…. that’s disrespectful and disdainful…
I feed my family with the bounty of nature and my harvest… to help save money for fuel and bills…
Bambi makes and made me a more conscious aware of my actions hunter….
The movie made me accept accountability for what I was doing ..
It’s why I stop in the middle of the road to pick up turtles as the cross… regardless of the traffic behind me…
What a wonderful comment! Bravo Mike!
According to the 1958 Disney documentary ‘White Wilderness’ lemmings committed mass suicide every few years (supposedly when population numbers became too large) by throwing themselves off a cliff. Except they don’t and the scene was faked with the wrong species of lemming for the area and they were actually thrown into the sea, and off a turntable into a river, by man. And yet we grew up saying “oh, they’re like lemmings all ridiculously committing suicide by jumping over a cliff’ when we wanted to highlight a bizarre aspect of group behaviour – yet that was based on poor research, leading to doctored documentary footage – and a myth was born. Or was Disney maybe making a point, especially as memory of WW2 began to fade? Was he saying: How do we end up where we often do? Does film/propaganda now set the narrative for what we believe and then guide us on our way to make those ‘dreams’ come true…. Powerful stuff media.
Most loved attraction at Disney parks?
The Haunted Mansion
Most loved after-hours/holiday party? Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party, hosted by Jack Skellington from Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Maybe you are looking in the wrong place. Maybe death is good for business.
Not death, but the thrill without the risk.
Hated that movie. The absolute worse scene in Bambi was this line of Thumper:
“If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”
For:
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do (and Say) nothing.”
But that expression from 1938 had staying power, being still heard a lot in the 1960s and 1970s. And it seems to have been reborn in the hypersensitive American college scene, where people feel “threatened” by mere words.
What it really means is just be nice to people.
That’s funny. You insert the word”say” where it doesn’t belong to make it work.