Bambi for the child within

Bambi, U.S.A., 1942, 70 min

D: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, David Hand, Graham Heid, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Norman Wright

Voices: Hardie Albright, Donnie Dunagan, Sam Edwards

There is a type of movie that you feel very attached to although you realize that the subject is neither very valuable, nor too profound. If you meet with the story even from the earliest age, then the chance that its charm would devour you is even bigger. I received the Bambi book edited by Egmont Romania with the copyright of Disney when I had fewer years than fingers at both my hands, and the wide, colorful pages with very little text, so as for the children, charmed me from the very beginning. You could easily imagine how happy I was when I recently had the chance to see the animated picture. I believed that it would happen as with most reencounters with childhood stories: the mature man would refuse not only the narrative course, but also the songs, the colors, the atmosphere, and more than an hour of childish escapism may seem forever. But still, that did not happen. Bambi and Thumper reappeared full of life – even more, given the fact that they were moving, not only popping up in diverse situations, as in my first years’ of school book.

The animation is a pleasant surprise. Inspired by the works of Tyrus Wong, a Chinese animator that used soft settings and colors, Walt Disney’s animation conveys a very strong home-like sensation. The forest in which the small stag prince is born is so familiar to us, as if we all were born there, and Thumper resembles the childhood football partner who always made noise when playing and called us to all sorts of dangerous games. Coming back to the graphic part, the first problem that had to be solved was Bambi’s face. As we all know, a deer has eyes on the sides of the head, with a long neck and basically no chin. The Disney animators spent more than a year making sketches and studying the anatomy of the specie, so that all the difficulties are surpassed. Eventually, after intense efforts, Marc Davis managed to solve the problem with a cute gag: Bambi’s face was to borrow the traits of a baby, while the body remained a deer’s. The name of the main character was invented by the Austrian writer Felix Salten, who started to create out of boredom. While having a trip south of the Alps, he was fascinated by the Italian word “bambino”, from which the Marc Davis’ idea concerning Bambi’s face.

The movie has more serious implications than a simple story for children. At the first level, we follow up the birth and growth of the stag on its way to become the mighty king of the forest, a typical Bildungsroman structure. Then, pretty obvious and at times tiresome and insistent, the fashionable theme in our times: the forest (planet) in danger because of man’s foolishness. Incapable of conserving what the nature offered him, the individual that claims to be not only at the top of the food chain, but also the most evolved, destroys everything, being the only specie that kills for pleasure, without being hungry. The forest is stormed several times, but it is interesting to observe that Man (personified in the eyes of Bambi’s mother: “Man is in the forest!”) does not appear explicitly, the producers creating in this way a powerful effect of suspense, comparable to the ones in the classic horror movies, because we never know where it will strike. In any case, seeing the forest burning and the peaceful course of the animal’s lives changed by the caprice of man, we can but observe ourselves critically, in our entire splendor.

Another innovation brought by Walt Disney, something totally unconceivable for those times, was the usage of children voices instead of softened adults’. That is how the “kindergarten” from the recording studio battled the one in the animation, giving a plus in authenticity to the production. Another plus for the screening goes to the soundtrack, mainly signed by Frank Churchill and Larry Morey. Little April shower or Love is a song create a magical universe, hard to say if intimately related to childhood or not, but in any case very close to us and warm. It is, however, ironic (hard to say with all the conviction whether it is a goof or not) that, right after a tragic event, the song in the coming scene, where the spring comes to the forest, is Let’s sing a gay little spring song. To be observed that “gay” is used here in the initial, French meaning, of “happy”, and not in the modern, vulgar way.

Walt Disney was initially restrained in producing Bambi, because the times were very hard, with the war dragging on, London being bombed by the Germans and the remaining resources hardly sufficient. Even under these circumstances, after seeing a test-animation with the cute stag, Walt’s heart melted, as does ours, no matter the age. The pleasant surprise leaves us always to remember those times when the successive shots, screened in a fast rhythm so as to create the illusion of movement, when the work was very hard for a few minutes of animation and when any type of computer of graphic electronic technology was still science-fiction. Bambi is, at the same time, a fantasy, a parable and a fable. We can choose either option or all of them, but by no means are we allowed to say that the animation is only for children