Disney Movie Reviews #5: Bambi

After the huge letdown that was Dumbo, I was feeling a little down on this whole endeavor.  I was afraid that any Disney movie could hold the potential to be a cheap cash-grab, when the whole point of my review project is appreciating artistry.  Thankfully, Bambi handily put my fears to rest.

Based on a novel by the Austrian Felix Salten, a Jewish eroticist who left Austria after his books were banned by the Nazis, Bambi tells the tale of a young deer growing up, coming to grips with the cruel realities of the natural world, and dealing with the constant threat of man's encroachment into nature.  (The part about being an eroticist was not well-known at the time, but is now commonly accepted).

The book was hugely popular in America, even with its newfangled conservationist message, and Disney snatched up the rights to it from MGM after they gave up on trying to make a live-action version.  It was intended to be the second of Disney's full-length animated features, but production delays, mostly from problems in adapting the plot from the book's serious tone, kept it on the back-burner for years.

Disney was testing the waters with adapting licensed works, you see.

Reading his movie reviews, you could always tell how much Roger Ebert had enjoyed a film by how much time he spent talking about its plot.  He would describe the plots of terrible movies in detail, but with good ones, he'd focus on some element outside the plot that set it apart, like its politics.  For great movies, he would discuss metaphysics.  Whatever the story, if you didn't know much about it at the end of the review, that was a sure sign it was going to be a good time.

But I'm not certain that approach would indicate much with Bambi, as it doesn't really have a plot at all.  The movie is a series of loosely serialized vignettes, but it doesn't have a traditional beginning, middle, and end.  The plot, like nature, is essentially cyclical

In my prior reviews, I tried to judge the movies based on how they'd iterated on what Disney had done before, or focused on entirely new techniques that had been developed.  Bambi throws a wrench in that because of its production schedule.  Visually, it does have a lot in common with Snow White's forest scenes, and you can see the clear inspirations it drew from those.  In terms of animation technique, though, there isn't much to see that you couldn't find somewhere in Pinocchio or Fantasia.

That's probably because these techniques were first developed for Bambi, and then adapted for use in the other movies during production.  But since Bambi came out after those, it's hard to get excited now.  Rather than the revolutionary, experimental visuals of the prior few movies (excluding Dumbo, of course), we get something that feels very much like an evolutionary, incremental step forward.  But then, if Bambi had come out first, the others might have felt like incremental steps backwards.  Bambi just looks that good.

I was excited by the interplay between foreground and background, and the masterful panning across, and zooming past, multiple backgrounds simultaneously while changing focus, that was best exhibited in Pinocchio.  But here, the backgrounds may as well be foregrounds; they rotate, zoom, and fade into one another with aggressive but deliberate energy.  The sensation is one of overwhelming care and control, and it plays perfectly into the tranquility that the forest scenes are meant to evoke.  Everything is smooth and gentle, dreamlike, slightly blurred at the edges, doing its best to present a beautiful curve.

Life abhors hard edges.

Really, the entire movie passes as if in a dream.  One scene melts into the other with little in the way of transition but a subtle turning of the seasons.  You might close your eyes for a moment, only to open them on an entirely new scene, the only clues being the changing of the leaves and the sudden disappearance of the spots on Bambi's coat.

He really ought to shave that peach fuzz, though.

It progresses much more gradually than you might have realized; over the course of the movie, four different voice actors play Bambi.  Right after watching, I'd thought it had just been two -- that's how subtle the changes are.

It's like looking into a mirror.  A mirror that is also a time portal.

There are other subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways that Disney conveys the themes of the movie.  The sense of time being cyclical is reinforced through a series of intentionally mirrored scenes.  In fact, with the exceptions of when the characters fall in love, and the climactic final showdown, every scene in the movie has a double.  The dualism allows for slight changes that neatly emphasize the plot beats without needing to directly explain much.  The death of Bambi's mother is the perfect example.

The first time Bambi and his mother go to the meadow, it's introduced with suspense and a bit of terror, as she approaches with complete seriousness and alertness.  The tension is high, it's made clear that it's a very dangerous place to be, and even though they have a good time there, the scene ends with the animals fleeing at the approach of man, and a single shot rings out, though nobody is hurt.

The second time is after a long, cold winter, when there is nothing to eat and the deer are reduced to stripping bark off the trees (scenes highly reminiscent of the dinosaurs starving in Fantasia, I might add!).  When even that runs out, they're forced to make their way, once more, to the meadow.  The sense of danger remains, but it's lessened.  After all, everything was fine the last time we were here.

But once more, man arrives, Bambi and his mother flee, and a shot rings out as Bambi makes his escape.  Only this time, his mother is not beside him.  He searches through the woods, calling out to her for a long, lonely minute in the thickening snow (a full minute, which is a terribly long time for a frightened child).  In the end, he encounters his father, the Great Prince of the Forest, who informs him, in solemn tone:  "Your mother can't be with you anymore."

"Come, my son."

This is the most powerful scene in Bambi.  Like Pinocchio's nose and Dumbo flying, the death of Bambi's mother is the lingering memory that speaks to us stronger than any other across the years.  What's special about it is that nothing is shown.  We see her running, we hear a shot, and we never see her again.  We are not told she is dead.  We are left to understand it for ourselves.  That's why this scene is so powerful.  It does not say, "Bambi's mother is dead."  It says, "Bambi's mother was shot, and can't be with him anymore.  What happened to her?"  The child sees Bambi's tear, and understands.  She died.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the snow.

The creators of Bambi understood the magic of "show, don't tell".  Whenever we are told anything in this story, it is only so that later something can happen to subvert the expectation that the words created.  Unlike Pinocchio, which portrayed childhood as a gradual rise out of idiocy, Bambi understands that children are not stupid, but merely uninformed and struggling to deal with a world built on strange rules that they cannot be expected to know, but which will nevertheless punish them for their ignorance.  Bambi is about the process of coming to grips with that world and understanding one's place in it, and the pains and triumphs experienced along the way.

It's hard.  It's hard, and nobody understands.

And yes, Bambi falls in love, and battles for his love, and fends off the hounds of man alongside his father, and has children of his own, and becomes the next Great Prince of the Forest.  But that stuff is less important, and only exists to create a dramatic plot.  What matters is the feeling that all this has happened before, and will continue to happen, because that is the way of the things.  When older character, such as the owl, speak of the future, it is with a certainty born of inevitability.

This picture could substitute for this entire review.

Bambi is a great movie.  It's so well-done, so endlessly charming, so beautifully conceived and so relentlessly entertaining that reviewing it is almost impossible.  It's not perfect, but its imperfections speak more to the limitations of storytelling than any production issues.  When I started reviewing it, I was afraid I'd have nothing to say, because there's hardly anything to criticize, and little so much better than in prior Disney movies to be worth mentioning.  Now I find I'm running out of time, and I've barely begun to address some important points.

The treatment of man in the movie, and the ecological implications of man's forays into nature, are pointed and troublesome, but not overt.  Still, many hunters rebuked Disney for posing them as the villains.  It's true that the final setpiece, where the entire forest bursts into flame due to a neglected campfire running amok, can be directly attributed to the hunters' negligence.  But I'd say, aside from that accident, Disney presents a fairly balanced, if nonsensical, view of the interaction between hunter and animal.  Except when the hunters shoot at chipmunks.

The visual presentation of Bambi as a deer is marvelous in its combination of anatomical precision and expressive cuteness.  Dumbo also contained elements of this anatomical animation mastery, but Dumbo was a stumpy little elephant.  Bambi, in contrast, is a fully-realized deer at every stage of his life, and the ways his legs move and tangle around each other are a wonder.

I think he's got four left feet.

Finally, it deserves mentioning that the uniquely beautiful art style of the movie is owed to the artistic inspiration of Tyrus Wong, a Chinese immigrant who worked as a production illustrator at Disney.  Wong passed away a few days before this review was posted, at the tender age of 106.

I realize I haven't said much about the music.  Like the rest of the movie, it's pretty, but disconnected from any greater importance to the plot.  "Little April Shower" is the only vocal song that holds up for relistening.  But that doesn't matter -- the movie says what it needs to say.

So that's Bambi.  I don't think it could have been done any better.  It's worth taking the time to strive for perfection, which was my philosophy, too, in writing this review.

BAMBI
1942
RATING: A
REASONING:  It succeeds in every single goal it sets for itself, is never once boring, and adroitly teaches children the meaning of death.

Postscript:  In the United States, wild deer are a public safety hazard.  Due to hunting restrictions, the eradication of natural predators, and a few other factors, the deer population is wildly out of control.  Deer overpopulation kills hundreds of people each year in auto collisions and causes many hundreds of millions of dollars in property damage.  Deer are no more than large rural vermin and ought to be killed dead.

That said, in 1930 the deer population was about 1% of the current level, so Bambi may have gone a ways towards helping to save them from total elimination.  But we have gone too far the other way!  I encourage you to take up deer hunting today.