Review of Bambi (1942) by Marc G — 29 Jul 2010

It's one of the best efforts ever committed to cinema, and, in my opinion, certainly the best thing ever animated. The film is set apart from all others, even its fellow Disney Golden Age productions, in that it's so profound yet equally simple, playful and seemingly void of self-importance. Story-wise, Bambi remains cinema's greatest monomyth - it's basically Life, totalized within the most rudimentary of narratives: a deer, from fawn to antlered steward. Honesty, you could Campbell this movie to no end. Of course it's not just the content alone - the universal themes - that makes it classic; it's the execution, the most holistic of journeys via animated musical whimsy for children. The 'Little April Showers' sequence is, by itself, an even simpler, self-sustaining mini-thematic cycle within the larger film. It's an absolutely beautiful moment. Similar scenes, too, express the near-sum of the film through brief lyrical numbers, like young Bambi mimicking the grown male deer as they prance and buck off the open slope in balletic form.

Also effective is how different themes, each essential, are given appropriately different tones. Obviously, death, loss and transition from the maternal navel to the paternal masculine is a dark and scarring moment for Bambi, but equally fundamental are the trials of courtship that play out in lighthearted style with the 'Twitterpated' sequence, comically mystifying the opposite (female) sex as dangerous sirens in a boy's world; it only gets better in the way each of the three young males dismiss said dangers with confidence only to then be hopelessly hypnotized in succession - Flower's 'what-can-you-do?' shrug is the perfect gesture that rings true to this day. I agree that Man, in abstract form, makes for a notably poignant villain, even down to his finite, laconic reference not as a single entity, but a force against nature:

"What happened, Mother? Why did we all run?".

"Man was in the forest.".

Again, another simple yet prolific theme that issues both our real-world relationship with wildlife environments and, I think, the penetration and burning of our own dreams - as Bambi's world, though naturalistic, is nonetheless a fairy tale painting in motion. I just can't say enough good things about this movie.