Bambi
Bambi is a 1942 American animated drama film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. It is based on the 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods by Austrian author and hunter Felix Salten.[4][5] The film was produced by Walt Disney and directed by David Hand and a team of sequence directors.
This article is about the 1942 Disney animated film. For the original novel, see Bambi, a Life in the Woods. For other uses, see Bambi (disambiguation).Bambi
Supervising director
David Hand
Sequence directors
James Algar
Samuel Armstrong
Graham Heid
Bill Roberts
Paul Satterfield
Norman Wright
Story direction
Perce Pearce
Story adaptation
Larry Morey
Story development
Vernon Stallings
Melvin Shaw
Carl Fallberg
Chuck Couch
Ralph Wright
70 minutes
United States
English
$858,000[2]
$267.4 million[3]
The main characters are Bambi, a white-tailed deer; his parents (the Great Prince of the forest and his unnamed mother); his friends Thumper (a pink-nosed rabbit); and Flower (a skunk); 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.[6][7][8] 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 America.[9]
The film received three Academy Award nominations: Best Sound (Sam Slyfield), Best Song (for "Love Is a Song" sung by Donald Novis) and Original Music Score.[10]
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 placed third in animation.[11] In December 2011, the film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant".[12][13][14]
In January 2020, it was announced that a photorealistic computer-animated remake was in development.[15]
Plot
In a Maine 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" (who is so flattered, he keeps the name) 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 but does not realize that he is his father. 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 his abandoned son, the Great Prince leads Bambi home as he reveals to him that he is his father. Next year, Bambi has matured into a young stag, and his childhood friends have also entered young adulthood. They are warned of "twitterpation" 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.
Bambi is awakened afterward 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.
Production
Development
In 1933, Sidney Franklin, a producer and director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, purchased the film rights to Felix Salten's novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods, intending to adapt it as a live-action film. After years of experimentation, he eventually decided that it would be too difficult to make such a film and he sold the film rights to Walt Disney in April 1937.[18] 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.[18] However, the original novel was written for an adult audience, and was considered too "grim" and "somber" for a regular light-hearted Disney film.[18] The artists also discovered that it would be challenging to animate deer realistically.[19] These difficulties resulted in Disney putting production on hold while the studio worked on several other projects.[18] 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.[18] 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.[18]
Writing
There were many interpretations of the story. As writer and animator Mel Shaw recalled:
Reception
Critical reaction
At the time of the film's release, Bambi received mixed reviews from the critics, mainly because of the lack of fantasy elements in the film and objection towards a dramatic story of animals and their struggle to survive in the woods and avoid the threat of humans.[43] The New York Times claimed that "In the search for perfection, Mr. Disney has come perilously close to tossing away his whole world of cartoon fantasy."[44] Manny Farber of The New Republic wrote that "Bambi is interesting because it's the first one that's been entirely unpleasant…Mickey wouldn't be caught dead in this."
Farber added that "In an attempt to ape the trumped-up realism of flesh and blood movies, he has given up fantasy, which was pretty much the magic element."[45] Even Disney's daughter Diane complained, saying that Bambi's mother did not need to die. When Walt claimed that he was only following the book, Diane protested, saying that he had taken other liberties before and that Walt Disney could do whatever he wanted.[43]
Today, however, Bambi is viewed much more favorably. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 91% based on 53 reviews with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website consensus reads: "Elegantly animated and deeply touching, Bambi is an enduring, endearing, and moving Disney classic."[46] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 91 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[47] Critics Mick Martin and Marsha Porter call the film "the crowning achievement of Walt Disney's animation studio".[48] English film historian Leslie Halliwell wrote that Bambi was "one of Disney's most memorable and brilliant achievements with a great comic character in Thumper and a climactic forest fire sequence that is genuinely thrilling." He concluded that it was "a triumph of the animator's arts".[49]
Box office
The film was released during World War II and did not perform as well as hoped.[50] Roy O. Disney sent a telegram to his brother Walt after the New York opening of the film that read: "Fell short of our holdover figure by $4,000. Just came from Music Hall. Unable to make any deal to stay third week ... Night business is our problem."[51] The film earned RKO theatrical rentals of $1,270,000 in the United States and Canada in its initial release.[52][53]
Disney lacked access to much of the European market during the war,[51] however, the film earned rentals of $1,685,000 internationally for an initial worldwide total of $2,955,000, Disney's third highest, behind Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) with $7.8 million and Pinocchio (1940) with $3.2 million.[52]
In its first reissue in the United States in 1947, the film earned additional domestic rentals of $900,000 but did much better 10 years later, more than doubling the domestic rental total with a further $2.5 million[54] taking its total domestic rental earnings to $4.7 million.
The film earned $14 million in domestic rentals from its reissues in 1966 and 1975 giving it a total domestic rental of $18,735,000,[55] which equates to a gross of around $40 million.[56] In 1982, it grossed another $23 million in the United States and Canada and in 1988, a further $39 million, taking its total in the United States and Canada to $102 million,[56] making it (at the time) the second highest-grossing animated movie of all-time after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.[57] With grosses from international reissues, the film has a worldwide gross of $267 million.[56]
Legacy
The off-screen villain "Man" has been placed No. 20 on AFI's List of Heroes and Villains.[69]
Some critics have cited parallels between Frank Churchill's theme music for "Man" (which consisted of three simple notes) and John Williams's theme music in Jaws (which consists of two notes).[70]
Paul McCartney has credited the shooting death of Bambi's mother for his initial interest in animal rights.[71]
Soon after the film's release, Walt Disney allowed his characters to appear in fire prevention public service campaigns. However, Bambi was only loaned to the government for a year, so a new symbol was needed, leading to the creation of Smokey Bear.[72] Bambi and his mother also make a cameo appearance in the satirical 1955 Donald Duck short No Hunting: drinking from a forest stream, the deer are startled by a sudden trickle of beer cans and other debris, and Bambi's mother tells him, "Man is in the forest. Let's dig out."
In 2006, the Ad Council, in partnership with the United States Forest Service, started a series of Public Service Announcements that feature footage from Bambi and Bambi II for wildfire prevention. During the ads, as the Bambi footage is shown, the screen will momentarily fade into black with the text "Don't let our forests...become once upon a time", and usually (but not always) ending the ads with Bambi's line "Mother, what we gonna do today?" followed by Smokey Bear saying "Only you can prevent wildfires" as the Smokey logo is shown on the screen. Bambi had previously been the Forest Service's advertising icon beginning in 1942, but was only allowed by Disney to use the character for a year.[72][73]
In December 2011, Bambi was among the films selected for preservation in the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.[74] In its induction, the Registry said that the film was one of Walt Disney's favorites and that it has been "recognized for its eloquent message of nature conservation."[75]
Characters of the film appear in several other Disney media, such as guest appearances in the animated television series House of Mouse, Bambi being a character to summon in the video game Kingdom Hearts and its sequel Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories,[76] and Bambi, Thumper, Flower, Faline and Great Prince of the Forest being playable characters in Disney Magic Kingdoms.[77][78]
On December 17, 2018, a prison sentence passed against a man, in what is considered the biggest deer poaching case in Missouri history, contained the stipulation that the prisoner must view the film at least once each month during his one-year prison sentence.[79]
Media and merchandise
Comic adaptation
The Silly Symphony Sunday comic strip ran a three-month-long adaptation of Bambi from July 19 to October 4, 1942.[80]
Copyright
The copyrights for Bambi, a Life in the Woods were inherited by Anna Wyler, Salten's daughter, who renewed them in 1954. After her death, Wyler's husband sold the rights to Twin Books, a publishing company which subsequently filed a lawsuit against Disney, claiming Disney owed it money for the continued licensing for the use of the book. Disney countered by claiming that Salten had published the story in 1923 without a copyright notice, thus it immediately entered into the public domain. Disney also argued that if the claimed 1923 publication date was accurate, then the copyright renewal filed in 1954 had been registered after the deadline and was thus invalid. The courts initially upheld Disney's view; however, in 1996, the Ninth Circuit Court reversed the decision on appeal in Twin Books Corp. v. Walt Disney Co., 83 F.3d 1162 (1996).[83][84]
The American copyright of the novel expired on January 1, 2022.[85]