Bambi


Bambi is a 1942 American animated coming-of-age drama film produced by Walt Disney and released by RKO Radio Pictures, loosely based on Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods. It was directed by David D. Hand, and a team of six sequence directors.
The main characters are Bambi, a white-tailed deer; his parents ; his friends Thumper and Flower ; and his childhood friend and future mate, Faline. In the original book, Bambi was a roe deer, a species native to Europe, but Disney decided to base the character on a mule deer from Arrowhead, California. Illustrator Maurice "Jake" Day convinced Disney that the mule deer had large "mule-like" ears and were more common to western North America, but that the white-tail deer was more recognized throughout the United States. The film received three Academy Award nominations: Best Sound, Best Song and Original Music Score.
In June 2008, the American Film Institute presented a list of its "10 Top 10"—the best ten films in each of ten classic American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Bambi attained third in animation. In December 2011, the film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant". A follow-up, Bambi II, premiered in theaters in Argentina on January 26, 2006, before being released as a direct-to-video title in the United States on February 7, 2006. In January 2020, it was announced that a photorealistic computer-animated remake was set to be in development. However, on January 2026, it was reported that the live-action remake film had been cancelled.

Plot

Deep in the forest, a doe gives birth to a male fawn named Bambi, who will one day take over the position of Great Prince of the Forest, who guards the woodland creatures. Bambi grows up very attached to his mother, with whom he spends most of his time. The fawn is befriended by an eager, energetic male rabbit named Thumper, who helps to teach him to walk and speak, a young male skunk he mistakenly calls "Flower" and a female fawn named Faline. Curious and inquisitive, Bambi frequently asks about the world around him and is cautioned about the dangers of life as a forest creature by his loving mother.
One day out in a meadow, Bambi briefly sees the Great Prince, the oldest and most experienced stag. As the Great Prince wanders uphill, he discovers the human hunter, named "Man" by all the animals, is coming and rushes down to the meadow to get everyone to safety. Bambi is briefly separated from his mother during that time but is escorted to her by the Great Prince as the three of them make it back in the forest just as Man fires his gun.
During Bambi's first winter, he and Thumper play in the snow while Flower hibernates. One day his mother takes him to find food when Man shows up again. As they run off, his mother is shot and killed by the hunter, leaving the little fawn mournful and alone. Taking pity on the abandoned fawn, the Great Prince leads Bambi home as he reveals to him that he is his father.
The following year, Bambi has matured into a young buck, and his childhood friends have also entered young adulthood. They are warned about becoming "twitterpated" by Friend Owl and that they will eventually fall in love, but the trio views the concept of romance with scorn. Thumper and Flower soon encounter their beautiful romantic counterparts and abandon their former thoughts on love. Bambi himself encounters Faline as a beautiful doe. Their courtship is quickly interrupted by a belligerent older stag named Ronno, who attempts to force Faline away from Bambi. Bambi successfully manages to defeat Ronno in battle and earn the rights to the doe's affections.
One day, Bambi is awakened by the smell of smoke; he follows it and discovers it leads to a hunter camp. His father warns Bambi that Man has returned with more hunters. Bambi is separated from Faline in the turmoil, but finds her cornered by Man's vicious hunting dogs, which he manages to ward off. Bambi escapes them and is shot by Man, but survives. Meanwhile, at the "Man's" camp, their campfire suddenly spreads into the forest, resulting in a wildfire from which the forest residents flee in fear. Bambi, his father, Faline, and the forest animals manage to reach shelter on a riverbank.
The following spring, Faline gives birth to twins under Bambi's watchful eye as the new Great Prince of the Forest.

Voice cast

The voice cast was all uncredited, as was the practice at the time for many animated films.

Development

In 1933, Sidney Franklin purchased the rights to Felix Salten's novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods to produce a live-action film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but soon realized that it would be too difficult to achieve. Joseph M. Schenck of United Artists suggested he make an animated version in alliance with Walt Disney, who was contemplating the idea of his first full-length feature at the time, with Bambi as one of the possible choices. Later that year, Franklin approached him with the idea, but Disney eventually refused, feeling that his animation studio was unprepared for the technical difficulties that Bambi would have presented. Franklin sold the film rights to Walt Disney in April 1937. Disney began work on crafting an animated adaptation immediately, intending it to be the company's second feature-length animated film and their first to be based on a specific, recent work. However, the original novel was written for an adult audience, and was considered too "grim" and "somber" for a regular light-hearted Disney film. The artists also discovered that it would be challenging to animate deer realistically. These difficulties resulted in Disney putting production on hold while the studio worked on several other projects, and eventually Pinocchio became the studio's second film. In 1938, Disney assigned Perce Pearce and Carl Fallberg to work on the film's storyboards, but attention was soon drawn away as the studio began working on Fantasia. Finally, on August 17, 1939, production on Bambi began in earnest, but progressed slowly owing to changes in the studio personnel, location, and methodology of handling animation at the time.

Writing

There were many interpretations of the story. As writer and animator Mel Shaw recalled:
Originally the film was intended to have six individual bunny characters, similar to the dwarfs in Snow White. However, Perce Pearce suggested that they could instead have five generic rabbits and one rabbit with a different color than the rest, with one tooth, would have a very distinct personality. This character later became known as Thumper. There originally was a brief shot in the scene where Bambi's mother dies after jumping over a log and getting shot by a man. Larry Morey, however, felt the scene was too dramatic, and that it was emotional enough to justify having her death occur off screen. Walt Disney was also eager to show the man burned to death by his fire that he inadvertently started, but this was discarded when it was decided not to show the man at all.
There was a scene involving two autumn leaves conversing like an old married couple before parting ways and falling to the ground, but Disney found that talking flora did not work in the context of the film, and instead a visual metaphor of two realistic leaves falling to the ground was used instead. Disney and his story team also developed the characters consisting of a squirrel and a chipmunk that were to be a comic duo reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy. However, after years of experimentation, Walt felt that the story should focus on the three principal characters: Bambi, Thumper and Flower. The squirrel and chipmunk make only brief appearances in the final film. The writing was completed in July 1940, by which time the film's budget had increased to $858,000, with the final budget reaching $2 million.

Animation

Although the animators had animated deer in Snow White, they were animated, in the words of Eric Larson, "like big flour sacks". Disney wanted the animals in Bambi to be more realistic and expressive than those in Snow White. He had Rico LeBrun, a painter of animals, come and lecture to the animators on the structure and movement of animals. The animators visited the Los Angeles Zoo and Disney set up a small zoo at the studio with animals such as rabbits, ducks, owls, and skunks, and a pair of fawns named Bambi and Faline so that the artists could see first-hand the movement of these animals. LeBrun's sketches depicted realistic animals, but as characters they lacked personality. Marc Davis created the final design of Bambi by incorporating LeBrun's realistic study of deer anatomy but exaggerating the character's face by making his proportions baby-like. Although there were no humans in Bambi, live-action footage of humans was used for one scene: actress Jane Randolph and Ice Capades star Donna Atwood acted as live-action references for the scene where Bambi and Thumper are on the icy pond. The animators learned a lot about animals during the film's production, giving them a broader spectrum of animation styles to use in future projects.
The backgrounds for the film were inspired by the Eastern American woodlands. One of the earliest and best-known artists for the Disney studio, Maurice "Jake" Day, spent several weeks in the Vermont and Maine forests, sketching and photographing deer, fawns, and the surrounding wilderness areas. However, his first sketches were too "busy" as the eye did not know where to focus. Tyrus Wong, a Chinese animator, showed Day some of his impressionistic paintings of a forest. Day liked the paintings and appointed him art director of the film. Wong's backgrounds were revolutionary since they had more detail around the center and less around the edges, thus leading a viewer's eye to the characters. Due to World War II, which began in Europe in 1939, Pinocchio and Fantasia failed at the box office. Facing financial difficulty, Disney was forced to cut 12 minutes from the film before final animation to save production costs.