I love deer. I think they are among the most majestic creatures on this effing planet!
Bambi is about the passing of time, getting older. From the day we are born, moments pass. We struggle to walk, to talk, we learn new words. We meet new people, we make friends, and sometimes those friends find themselves a partner, and you drift apart. Seasons change. Our loved ones die. We grow older. Time passes. We might become more serious and less playful as we get older. That’s all what Bambi does too.
So the movie is famous for being sad. We know that it is one of the saddest animated movies in history, but at the time of its release, it was the only sad animated film. Snow White and Pinocchio had some sad individual scenes, but Bambi is overall a sad movie. And not to be such a fucking downer, but life is sad. Everyone you love, or have loved, will die. There’s someone dying right now. It’s unbearably sad. Everyone talks about the death of Bambi’s mom, and it is really sad. But there’s a scene later which is also tough to watch. There’s these birds hiding from the man, who is approaching. And one of them wants to fly away, but the others warn her not to. She starts panicking, terrified of the imminent threat. She gets so scared so she flies, and gets shot right out of the air. We see it fall dead to the ground.
There’s this owl character that I love, but he’s also weird. Spring comes and there’s birds chirping along, and the owl is like “shut the fuck up! I’m trying to sleep!” He’s a grumpy guy. But then Bambi, Thumper, and Flower show up and the owl goes into this weird explanation about horniness, which he calls “twitterpated.” He’s like, “you’ll just be walking along, minding your own business, then you’ll see a pretty face and you’ll get horny [twitterpated] and you’ll start acting all strange.” I guess that’s true, in a way.
Anyway, Bambi likes this girl, but a mean deer is trying to take her from him, so Bambi fights the mean deer. This scene is really strange to me. The animation changes to this silhouette-looking style which I don’t like. Kind of a minor complaint, and I would say that, other than that, the animation is quite appealing. There are some beautiful scenes of meadows and waterfalls and trees.
This movie is also about mankind’s relationship with nature. We destroy it. We kill it. We BURN it. And we’re still doing that. Quite sad.
Like Dumbo, this movie suffers from a minimal amount of character development. Bambi just doesn’t say much. He’s more emotive than Dumbo, but I’d still be surprised to hear that anyone’s favorite Disney character is Bambi. In the end, Bambi and the girl deer, after becoming sufficiently twitterpated, bring two new deer into the world. Bambi is now a stoic, watchful protector of the forest.
The movie is.. okay. The images of the forest and the changing of the seasons look very good, but the film is lacking in substance. It definitely could have used a more well-defined main character, like Pinocchio or Cinderella, characters who were brought to screen around the same time period.
Lefty Forrester 