Bambi

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This article is about the 1942 Walt Disney film. For other uses, see Bambi (disambiguation).

Bambi

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	RKO Radio Pictures
Release date(s)	August 13, 1942
Running time	70 min.
Language	English
Preceded by	Dumbo (1941)
Followed by	Saludos Amigos (1942)
IMDb profile

Bambi is the fifth animated feature in the Disney animated features canon, originally released to theatres by RKO Radio Pictures on August 13, 1942 and produced by Walt Disney. 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 roe deer 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, 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.

1 Plot
2 History
3 Recycled animation from Bambi in other films
4 Trivia
5 Soundtrack Listing
6 Voice cast
7 Supervising Animators
8 See also
9 References
10 External links

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

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 hunters. 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 tells 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.

The death of Bambi's mother is one of the most famous moments in American film history, a moment so upsetting to certain children that they had to be carried screaming out of the theater during Bambi's numerous theatrical presentations. 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. 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".

[edit] History

1989 VHS cover of Bambi.

[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 will go on moratorium on January 31, 2007. [2]

[edit] Bambi theatrical release history

August 13, 1942 (New York City, New York release)
August 21, 1942 (USA release)
December 25, 1947
July 3, 1957
March 25, 1966
June 20, 1975
June 4, 1982
July 15, 1988

[edit] Worldwide release dates

[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 later 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).
In a recent interview to Newsweek magazine, 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 one 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.
In 1969 a film was produced called Bambi Meets Godzilla. The two minute movie (half of which was taken up by credits) consists of bambi eating in the woods before promptly being stepped on by Godzilla's foot.
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 favourite film.
There are asteroids named 15845 Bambi and 16626 Thumper.
In an early draft 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 in this movie.
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, "Was she killed?" 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, "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.

[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

[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] 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.