D52 Week 5: Bambi!

Most Montanans are heartless monsters who like murdering things with guns. That's a fact. Hunting's really big here. There's something about wide open spaces filled with adorable animals that seems to make people want to shoot all of them, repeatedly. I can't say I'm sure why. During my public schooling days, I knew a kid who actually rooted for The Man. When Bambi's mom got shot, he cheered! "I wanna shoot Bambi", he declared proudly! (Last I checked, that kid grew up into a meth addict - something else wide open spaces seem to make people do.) It always seemed unsettling to me that anyone in existence could react to that infamous scene - a scene whose inherent childhood trauma value was regarded as significant enough for the film to land on Time's "Top 25 Horror Movies of All Time" list, of all places - not with shock or even indifference, but with sadistic glee. When I went to rewatch it for this little project, I hadn't even seen Bambi in over a decade. I'd forgotten just about every detail of the storyline, but that scene I could still remember in vivid detail. Was that because the rest of the movie was genuinely uninteresting? Or was it just that nothing, no matter how good, could possibly be as memorable in the shadow of one of the most childhood-traumalicious of Disney's many childhood traumas?

Bambi is no exception to the rule of weird pacing in early-period Disney stuff. Like Pinocchio, the story plays out in unapologetically episodic fashion. Each seasonal snippet of Bambi's life plays out right to its climax, before we flash forward to the next season, where new stuff happens. The difference here is that each "episode", though largely self-contained, actually manages to resonate through future episodes, the events of Bambi's past shaping his growing confidence. Pinocchio, as a character, never really grew - he started his film as a naïve but kind-hearted lad, underwent some traumatic adventures, and emerged as a naïve but kind-hearted lad who essentially got lucky that no strangers lived inside Monstro's tummy. Now, let's be honest, Bambi isn't the deepest character ever, either....but at least he visibly evolves. His mother's death isn't outwardly explored in any way at all, but internally, one can easily see this as the motivating factor turning the cogs in his brain and causing him to cast off his shyness and take charge when grave seriousness rears its ugly head again. Actually having a somewhat satisfying thread holding everything together has already gone a long way towards making this a better, more stable film than its pretty-but-flimsy Disney predecessors.

Also helping it along is their most technically impressive animation yet. Though the realistic animation style does, admittedly, remove just a bit of the usual Disney sense of wonder, this is effectively made up for by Disney's most awesomely expressive characters up to this point in time. Flower is more convincingly bashful than Bashful ever was, and Thumper's unenthused recitations of his father's lame cliché morals are a terrific, adorable, terrifically adorable, and adorably terrific bit of physical cartoon acting. But the most impressive animation of all, fittingly, belongs to our titular character. I don't think it would be a controversial statement on my part to say that deer are a fairly hard animal to draw. *points to comic* As quadrupeds go, they're very spindly creatures, and when it comes to capturing their forms realistically, there's a very fine line between cute and unsettlingly creepy, which is very easy to cross. (If you're questioning this, go search the interwebs for deer-related drawings. Now.) And Bambi never, ever crosses that line, always looking convincingly like a deer and not, say, some sort of bug-eyed mutant alien baby. Young Bambi, in particular, was showcased in two sequences that really blew my mind when I started considering just how technically difficult they probably were. First, his early attempts at walking, which are pretty stunningly convincing; and second, the ice-skating sequence with Thumper propping him up, one leg at a time. The animators didn't just do a great job of drawing Bambi's form, they worked overtime figuring out all the interesting physical possibilities it offered. Which is just awesome, of course. At the same time, though, they knew exactly when to break from the mostly strictly realistic animation style the film is known for to achieve specific effects. During moments of sheer terror, in particular, the colour palettes and backgrounds start to morph, sometimes almost unnoticeably, to create a subtly hallucinatory aura. (Maybe Time wasn't so off the mark when they claimed this was some sort of horror film.) Meanwhile, the scene where Bambi learns about his mom is possibly the most plainly animated, generally bleak-looking part of the film, wisely letting that well-done understated emotional moment play out solely on its own merits, perhaps the only part of the film that actively doesn't allow the audience to become distracted by the natural beauty of the forest. All of the early Disney films I've seen have been beautifully animated, but Bambi is so meticulously crafted in the visual department that it easily takes the cake.

And yet, those other films tend to strike me as more rewatchable than this one. I'm not fully sure why. Maybe it's the soundtrack, which certainly isn't bad or anything, but is a fairly one-note affair. (Confession: The vocal songs in this film are in one of the few old-timey styles I've never really dug, so I was predisposed to not really care for them anyway, really. Can't blame the film for that.) Maybe it's the fact that Man is one of the least enjoyable villains in the Disney canon, bringing nothing but emotionally detached death and destruction without so much as a cool villain monologue to legitimize it. (This makes it a better parable for the evils of hunting, of course, but hinders the film as entertainment in every other way.) Maybe it's the fact that the relatively realistic vibe means that the cute fuzzy animal characters' actions are a little less relateable to a human audience. *points to the comic* Or maybe, for personal reasons, it's that I always sort of resent the implication that falling in love means having to abandon one's friends, which it really really should not. Whatever the case, even though this is an amazingly gorgeous film with a relatively well-executed emotional arc, it's probably not anything I'm eager to go ahead and relive any time soon.

Then again, is Bambi a movie that ever really needs to be rewatched? We can connect with the powerful situations the film manages to evoke - there's a reason Bambi's mom's death tends to stick with people despite being a really tame scene when you really break it down - but it's harder to connect with the characters. The fact that the different characters mostly tend to exist in their own little spheres certainly adds to the film's oddly enchanting aura of realism, but it also adds a certain coldness to the proceedings, resulting in a world that doesn't go out of its way to warmly welcome repeat viewings. But, you definitely need to see it once. After all, completely missing out on this experience would be doing a disservice to yourself, an astonishingly hard-working crew of animators, and several decades' worth of cliché childhood trauma jokes.

UNNECESSARY DIRECT-TO-DISNEY-DVD SEQUEL CONCEPT: In Bambi III, we learn that Mama Bambi was alive all this time! She just had amnesia, that's all. Which was sad, but it's all better now, which means that Bambi can stop growing as a cervine being and be happy. Awwwww. Meanwhile, it's Thumper's turn to experience the horrors of man, by engaging him in a silly parody of Richard Wagner's operas. There's a great linchpin death scene there, too!