Bambi is a 1942 American animated drama film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Loosely based on Felix Salten's 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods, the production was supervised by David D. Hand, and was directed by a team of sequence directors, including James Algar, Bill Roberts, Norman Wright, Sam Armstrong, Paul Satterfield, and Graham Heid.
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.[4][5][6] 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 the United States.[7]
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.[8]
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.[9] In December 2011, the film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant".[10][11][12]
In January 2020, it was announced that a photorealistic computer-animated remake was in development.[13]
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 and (unbeknownst to Bambi himself) is his father. 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 know 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 about becoming "twitterpated" 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.
The voice cast was all uncredited, as was the practice at the time for many animated films.
In 1933, Sidney Franklin purchased the rights to Felix Salten's novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods (1923) to produce a live-action film for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but soon realized that it would be too difficult to achieve.[14][22] Joseph M. Schenck of United Artists suggested he make an animated version in alliance with Walt Disney, who was contemplating the idea of his first full-length feature at the time, with Bambi as one of the possible choices.[23] Later that year, Franklin approached him with the idea, but Disney eventually refused, feeling that his animation studio was unprepared for the technical difficulties that Bambi would have presented.[23][24] Franklin sold the film rights to Walt Disney in April 1937.[25] 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.[25] However, the original novel was written for an adult audience, and was considered too "grim" and "somber" for a regular light-hearted Disney film.[25] The artists also discovered that it would be challenging to animate deer realistically.[26] These difficulties resulted in Disney putting production on hold while the studio worked on several other projects, and eventually Pinocchio became the studio's second film.[25] 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.[25] 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.[25]
There were many interpretations of the story. As writer and animator Mel Shaw recalled:
The story of Bambi had a so many possibilities, you could go off on a million tangents. I remember one situation when Walt became involved with himself. He said 'Suppose we have Bambi step on an ant hill and we cut inside and see all the damage he's done to the ant civilization'. We spent weeks and weeks developing the ants, and then all of a sudden we decided, you know, we're way off the story, this has got nothing to do with the story of Bambi. We also had a family of grasshoppers, and they get into a family squabble of this or that, and Bambi is watching all of this, and here's the big head of Bambi in the grasshoppers. And what's that got to do with the story, and this would go on many times.[26]
Originally the film was intended to have six individual bunny characters, similar to the dwarfs in Snow White. However Perce Pearce suggested that they could instead have five generic rabbits and one rabbit with a different color than the rest, with one tooth, would have a very distinct personality.[27] This character later became known as Thumper.
There originally was a brief shot in the scene where Bambi's mother dies after jumping over a log and getting shot by a man. Larry Morey, however, felt the scene was too dramatic, and that it was emotional enough to justify having her death occur off screen.[26][27] Walt Disney was also eager to show the man burned to death by his fire that he inadvertently started, but this was discarded when it was decided not to show the man at all.[26] There was also a scene involving two autumn leaves conversing like an old married couple before parting ways and falling to the ground, but Disney found that talking flora did not work in the context of the film, and instead a visual metaphor of two realistic leaves falling to the ground was used instead.[27] Disney and his story team also developed the characters consisting of a squirrel and a chipmunk that were to be a comic duo reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy. However, after years of experimentation, Walt felt that the story should focus on the three principal characters: Bambi, Thumper and Flower.[27] The squirrel and chipmunk make only brief appearances in the final film.
The writing was completed in July 1940, by which time the film's budget had increased to $858,000.[25]
Although the animators had animated deer in Snow White, they were animated, in the words of Eric Larson, "like big flour sacks".[26] Disney wanted the animals in Bambi to be more realistic and expressive than those in Snow White. He had Rico LeBrun, a painter of animals, come and lecture to the animators on the structure and movement of animals.[28] The animators visited the Los Angeles Zoo and Disney set up a small zoo at the studio with animals such as rabbits, ducks, owls, and skunks, and a pair of fawns named Bambi and Faline so that the artists could see first-hand the movement of these animals.[27][28][29] LeBrun's sketches depicted realistic animals, but as characters they lacked personality. Marc Davis created the final design of Bambi by incorporating LeBrun's realistic study of deer anatomy but exaggerating the character's face by making his proportions baby-like (short snout, big eyes, etc.).[26] Although there were no humans in Bambi, live-action footage of humans was used for one scene: actress Jane Randolph and Ice Capades star Donna Atwood acted as live-action references for the scene where Bambi and Thumper are on the icy pond.[30] The animators learned a lot about animals during the film's production, giving them a broader spectrum of animation styles to use in future projects.[31]
The backgrounds for the film were inspired by the Eastern American woodlands. One of the earliest and best-known artists for the Disney studio, Maurice "Jake" Day, spent several weeks in the Vermont and Maine forests, sketching and photographing deer, fawns, and the surrounding wilderness areas.[32] However his first sketches were too "busy" as the eye did not know where to focus.[26] Tyrus Wong, a Chinese animator, showed Day some of his impressionistic paintings of a forest. Day liked the paintings and appointed him art director of the film.[26] Wong's backgrounds were revolutionary since they had more detail around the center and less around the edges, thus leading a viewer's eye to the characters.[27]
Due to World War II, which began in Europe in 1939, Pinocchio and Fantasia failed at the box office. Facing financial difficulty, Disney was forced to cut 12 minutes from the film before final animation to save production costs.[25]
All lyrics are written by Larry Morey; all music is composed by Frank Churchill
Bambi premiered in London on August 8, 1942, as the first Disney film to premiere abroad.[33][34] It was released in theaters in United States five days later, on August 13.[35] The film was released during World War II and did not perform as well as hoped.[36] 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."[37] The film earned RKO theatrical rentals of $1,270,000 in the United States and Canada in its initial release.[38][39]
Disney lacked access to much of the European market during the war,[37] 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.[38]
The film was re-released to theatres in the United States in 1947, 1957, 1966, 1975, 1982 and 1988. 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[40] 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,[41] which equates to a gross of around $40 million.[3] 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,[3] making it (at the time) the second highest-grossing animated movie of all-time after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.[42] With grosses from international reissues, the film has a worldwide gross of $267 million.[3]
Prior to Bambi's initial release on home video on September 28, 1989, initial orders placed in the United States and Canada up to the end of August totaled 9.8 million units, the second largest number of orders for a video at the time, behind E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, with a wholesale value of $167 million.[43] Even in home video, it has seen multiple releases, including three VHS releases — in 1989 (Classics Version), 1997 (Masterpiece Collection Version), and 2005 (Platinum Edition version), one Betamax release in 1989 (Classics version), two Laserdisc releases in 1989 (Classics version) and 1997 (Masterpiece Collection version). In 2005, a digitally remastered and restored Platinum Edition DVD was released;[44] it went on moratorium on January 31, 2007.[45]
Bambi was released as a Diamond Edition on March 1, 2011,[46] consisting of a Blu-ray and DVD combo pack. This release included multiple bonus features not previously included in Bambi home releases: a documentary entitled Inside Walt's Story Meetings – Enhanced Edition, two deleted scenes, a deleted song, an image gallery, and a game entitled Disney's Big Book of Knowledge: Bambi Edition.[47] This release also marked the first use of "Disney Second Screen",[48] a feature which is accessed via a computer or iPad app download that syncs with the Blu-ray disc,[49] allowing the viewer to follow along by interacting with animated flip-books, galleries and trivia while watching the movie.[46] A UK version of Diamond Edition was released on February 7, 2011.[50]
In honor of the film's 75th anniversary, Bambi was released as part of the Walt Disney Signature Collection on May 23, 2017 (digital) and June 6, 2017 (Blu-ray/DVD/digital combo pack).
On August 18, 2023, Bambi was re-released in cinemas across the UK only for one week as part of Disney's 100th anniversary.[51]
On the initiative of Stephen Greymoming, professor of Native American studies and anthropology at the University of Montana,[52] an Arapaho-language dubbing of the movie was produced in 1994, in collaboration with the Northern Plains Educational Foundation.[53] The final product was, however, only a partial dubbing, as the spoken parts were dubbed in Arapaho, but all the songs were left in English.[54][55] The dubbed version of the movie premiered on November 3 the same year, and Disney later provided the Arapaho Nation with 2000 VHS tapes of the movie.[56] The dubbing was never issued again in any other forms, until it was uploaded on the streaming platform Disney+ in October 2022.[57] Bambi was the first of three Disney movies to receive a dubbing in a Native American language.[57] The next such instance had to wait until 2016, when Pixar's Finding Nemo received a dubbing in Navajo,[58] and then Disney's Moana in Hawaiian two years later.[59] While the first was also made available on Disney+,[57] the latter was only distributed for free in schools in Hawaii, and never received any home media release form.[60]
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.[61] 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."[62] 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."[63] 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.[61]
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 consen