August 8 - Bambi

Image copyright Disney

On this day, in 1942, the Walt Disney Studio’s fifth animated feature, Bambi, had its world premiere in the midst of a war-torn London, England. In 1923, an Austrian novelist, Felix Salten, published one of the forerunners to environmental literature, Bambi, A Life in the Woods. The book about a buck who grows up in the forest, loses his mother, learns a few things from his father and avoids predatory hunters quickly became a bestseller and was almost instantly considered a classic. MGM purchased the film rights to Felix’s book in 1933, intending to make a live action adaptation of it. They spent four years trying to figure out how that would work without ever coming to a conclusion. In April 1937, MGM sold the rights to Walt Disney, who intended to turn Bambi into his studio’s second animated feature. That didn’t happen.

Disney ran into their own set of adaptation problems almost immediately. The book was written with an adult audience in mind; its dark themes and message were almost the opposite of the usual light and frothy children’s fare the studio produced. The story also lent itself to an almost infinite array of interpretations and subplots. The Story Department might spend weeks developing a sequence involving Bambi stepping on an ant hill and what happens to the colony in the aftermath before realizing none of that has anything to do with the central story and scrapping the whole thing. Compounding all of the story problems: the animators were finding deer to be extremely hard to draw realistically and consistently, especially their skinny little legs. Walt still believed that Bambi was worth doing, and doing right, but as time went by, the film slipped in the studio’s release order from second to third, then from third to fourth.

Image courtesy animationsource.org

By July 1940, the story issues had all been worked out. The animators had visited the Los Angeles Zoo multiple times to study deer and a pair of fawns had even been housed at the studio for a while for observational purposes. In fact, the work the animators put in on studying all kinds of animals, not just deer, would push the envelope on what kinds of characters and styles of animation the studio did for decades to come. Work on Bambi was finally ready to begin in earnest. When the last cell slid into place two years later, though, the world’s market for movies was a much different place.

Europe had already been embroiled in World War II for several months before production ramped up on Bambi. As a result, most of that continent’s market was closed off to American (or any other) movie studios. Pinocchio and Fantasia didn’t enjoy the same wide distribution as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and both lost money. Dumbo managed to recoup some of those losses only because it cost nearly a third less to produce than Pinocchio. In spite of the fact that Bambi cost almost $100,000 less than Dumbo to make (a huge chunk of change in those days), it too lost money in a war-time economy that now included the United States.

Image courtesy nal.usda.gov

Bambi received mixed reviews when it was initially released. Hunters hated it, of course, but there were a number of critics who bemoaned the fact that the film was too realistic in its depiction of animals. They felt that Disney was overreaching himself by removing the fantasy element. Even Walt’s own daughter, Diane, was critical. When she wanted to know why Bambi’s mother had to die, Walt said he was only following the book. Her response? You’ve changed stories before, dad. You’re Walt Disney. You can do whatever you want. Since those early days, however, Bambi has come to be seen for the masterpiece that it is. It’s listed at #3 on the American Film Institute’s list of the Top 10 Animated Films of All Time and was nominated for their list of the best 100 films. And the character of Man, who is never actually seen in the movie, came in at #20 on AFI’s list of best villains.

In 2006, the National Forest service began using footage from Bambi in their fire prevention public service announcements. It was a natural fit but wasn’t the first time that had happened. Right after the film was released, Disney allowed characters from Bambi to be used for the same purpose, but only for one year. At the end of that term, the licensing agreement wasn’t renewed which left the government in a bit of a bind. They managed to rally, though, creating the character of Smokey the Bear to take Bambi’s place.