Bambi’s Blues
New to Blue Ray, Walt Disney’s beloved animated classic Bambi was a controversial flop when it was first released.
“You’re worried about what you’re missing from the photo and I’m worried about losing my shirt!” Walt Disney, explaining to a director why the studio had to cut sequences from Bambi.
In 1937, full of confidence and a pioneering spirit as to what could be achieved in the cartoon medium, thirty-six-year-old Walt Disney purchased the film rights to the children’s book Bambi, A Life in the Woods. Written by the Hungarian Siegmund Salzmann, under the pseudonym Felix Salten in 1923, Bambi was one of many books banned in Adolf Hitler’s Germany in 1936 (reportedly, the usually animal-loving Nazis saw the story of the Jew Jump over forest creatures trying to survive the threat of man as an allegory of Jewish persecution). Despite warnings from its artists that it lacked a sufficient story and its heavy reliance on the German market, Walt Disney saw Bambi as a great opportunity to animate animals with human characteristics.
Walt Disney generally laughed off any political meaning in his films. The Three Little Pigs, made in 1933, was seen by many as an ode to the Great Depression; Happy pigs danced like happy-go-lucky people in the 1920s until the Big Bad Wolf wiped them out with the force of the 1929 stock market crash. of bricks was seen as an endorsement of President Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Seven years later, a columnist was smoking about Fantasia. In his mind, the climactic scene of the film, where the devil condemned human souls to a volcano, meant that Disney was saying that we were all defenseless against Nazi demons. Perhaps the most outlandish accusation was made three years earlier, when a leftist journalist wrote that in Snow White, when the seven dwarfs defeated the evil queen, it was a clear triumph for a miniature communist society. Disney would no doubt have recoiled upon discovering that many in the modern green movement would later cite seeing Bambi as the start of his interest in environmentalism.
The creation of Bambi turned out to be as painstaking as some in the studio feared. More of an idea man than an animator, Walt had neglected Bambi and let his artists take over the story. Two fawns, a male and a female, were flown in from Maine for cartoonists to study, after a while they began to act more like pets than the wild creatures Walt wanted to portray on screen. A breakthrough came when one morning a large deer came down from nearby Griffith Park to visit the doe at the Hollywood studio and startled human onlookers by lowering its head and pointing its antlers at them. After animal control took the deer away, the relieved cartoonists had a better idea of how to proceed. Walt began showing up at story meetings and made some of his trademark suggestions: Young Bambi might have a comical adventure stumbling across a frozen lake; Thumper, a character not mentioned in Salten’s book, could become, like Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, the main character with whom the audience would identify. Still, the picture dragged on and was finally completed in 1942.
By the time Walt put Bambi into production, Disney’s parents had died, Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia (1940) had failed and left Walt in debt, the studio had been wrecked by a labor strike, and the Japanese had bombed Pearl. . Port. Walt, no longer having access to the lucrative European market, was in desperate need of a hit. But Bambi received a lukewarm reception from critics, many of whom found the lives of animated talking animals too realistic. (Writing about Bambi in 1988, critic Roger Ebert declared the film to be sexist, noting that the father deer went off to live alone, leaving the mother with full responsibility for raising the child.) Some hunters, who found themselves after the release of Bambi, viewed as murderers, rather than jocks, deeply resented the film. The film lost 200,000 on its initial release, and Walt was upset when his daughter Diane called him out on the death of Bambi’s mother (Disney later resurrected her; the famous mother made cameo appearances in both The Sword and the Stone (1963) and in The Jungle Book four years later).
From then on Walt never had the same enthusiasm for animation, his desire to break new ground being directed more towards television, amusement parks and urban planning. However, despite the poor box office results, Walt was still proud of Bambi. He insisted that it was intended for entertainment, not a vanishing against the hunters, often saying in interviews that it was his favorite movie. Fifteen years passed before the general public shared their appreciation of him.
“I think back to 1942 when we released that picture and there was a war going on and no one cared about a deer’s love life, and the bankers were on my back. It’s very gratifying to know that Bambi finally made it.” — Walt Disney in 1957.