After the death of Bambi’s mother, all bets were off and there was no guarantee that anyone was going to make it out of the conflagration alive. “Man” is back in the forest again, unleashing the hounds and setting the trees aflame. There are very few songs – the only one of any note is the lovely Little April Showers – and the climax is no less affecting that the adult deer’s off-screen demise, the hellish firestorm that engulfs the forest as scary as anything Disney had depicted so far. His father’s words, “your mother can’t be with you any more…” will have horrified young and impressionable minds but in a film about the circle of life ( The Lion King (1994) owes a very real debt to Bambi), death is inevitable and in Bambi, many children were forced to deal with it – albeit at a distance – for the first time.įor all the frolicking animals of the opening scenes, Bambi is a remarkably sombre film. The killing of Bambi’s unnamed mother will have resonated with younger viewers (Disney’s daughter Diane among them – she was horrified by the killing) who were probably being confronted for the very first time with the horrible realisation that mums aren’t around forever. The climactic ravaging of the forest by the hunters features some of Disney’s finest animation so far.Īnd then of course, there’s that moment… Rarely has an off-camera death been so affecting. The detail in the animal designs is breath-taking and their movements are as realistic as anthropomorphised animated animals were ever going to get. There were still plenty of animated releases to come but they tended to be smaller, less fondly remembered films like Saludos Amigos (1943), Make Mine Music (1946) and Melody Time (1948) until 1950 when the bounced back with Cinderella.īambi marked another leap forward in animation excellence. The ongoing effects of the Second World War and the fallout from the animators’ strike of 1941, which led to the exodus of many of the early talents at Disney, saw the studio scale back its ambitions for he rest of the 1940s. It still took another three years to bring the story to the screen. The production of Disney’s version was a long, drawn out affair – Disney had his team of writers and animators start work on an ad potation as soon as he secured the rights but as Fantasia (1940) got in the way, production stalled and only picked up again in August 1939. MGM had planed a live-action version as early as 1933 but when producer Sidney Franklin realised that it was far too technically challenging an undertaking, he sold the rights to Disney in 1937.
But their relationship will have to wait – Man has returned to the forest and the animals are scattered in panic as flames destroy their woodland home and Bambi struggles to find Faline and lead the other animals to safety.īambi was based on a 1923 book by Austrian writer Felix Salten, Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde/Bambi, a Life in the Woods. Bambi falls for Faline (Ann Gillis) who has now grown into a beautiful doe. The wise Friend Owl (Will Wright) warns them of “twitterpation” and the onset of interest in the opposite sex and sure enough, Thumper (now voiced by Tim Davis) and Flower (Tim Davis) have soon found their mates. The Great Prince leads Bambi home and a year later, now a young stag, Bambi (Hardie Albright) returns to his friends. But the fawn’s life is changed forever when hunters descend on the meadow near their forest home and his mother is killed. Bambi (Donnie Dunagan, from Son of Frankenstein (1939)) is befriended by a young rabbit named Thumper (Peter Behn), a young skunk named Flower (Stan Alexander) and a female fawn named Faline (Cammie King). A never-named doe (voiced by Paula Winslowe) gives birth to a fawn named Bambi, destined to take over his father’s place as Great Prince of the Forest (Fred Shields). Its idyllic opening, with a glorious, multiplaned forest and pastoral music that leads into some cutesy business with young animals at play, hardly hints at the trauma to come. The film tends to be remembered more for that one scene (and some odd sexually suggestive moments) than for its admittedly thin storyline but it’s still a remarkable, important and stunning piece of work, the last of Disney’s first era of classic animated films. Walt Disney’s fifth animated feature film is the one that has scarred multiple generations of impressionable viewers with its off-camera but no less devastating killing of the eponymous young deer, the first time that a character had died in a Disney film.