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Bambi is a 1942 animated feature produced by Walt Disney and originally released to theatres by RKO Radio Pictures on August 13 1942. The fifth animated feature in the Disney animated features canon, the film is based on the 1923 book Bambi, A Life in the Woods by Austrian author Felix Salten.

The main characters are Bambi, a white-tailed deer, his parents (the Great Prince of the forest and his unnamed mother), and his friends Thumper (a pink-nosed rabbit), Flower (a skunk), and his childhood friend and future mate, Faline. For the movie, Disney took the liberty of changing Bambi's species into a white-tailed deer from his original species of roe deer, since roe deer don't inhabit the United States, and the white-tailed deer is more familiar to Americans. This film received 3 Academy Award nominations for Best Sound, Best Song for "Love is a song" and Original Music Score.

In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "Ten top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Bambi was acknowledged as the third best film in the animation genre.

Plot

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A fawn named Bambi is born in the woods and he spends his first days of life exploring the forest around him where he meets his new friends Thumper, a rabbit, Flower, a skunk, and Faline, a doe-fawn. He discovers birds ("bird" becomes his first word), butterflies, rain, the meadow, and also sees his father (the Great Prince of the Forest) for the first time.

The pivotal scene in the movie involves Bambi's mother and her death at the hands of Man. The scene is set in late winter, and Bambi and his mother struggle to find food. Joy is felt as they discover a patch of new grass, signalling the arrival of Spring. However, as they feast, Man's approach is heard off-screen. Bambi's mother suddenly catches Man's scent and orders her fawn to run. As they flee across the snow field, shots ring out. The camera stays with young Bambi as he runs through the forest, finally reaching their den. He turns around to find that his mother is nowhere to be seen.

In a series of dissolves, Bambi wanders desperately through the forest calling for her, but no answer comes. Bambi is startled by the sudden appearance of his father, the Great Prince of the Forest, who tells him his mother can no longer be with him.

The movie then skips forward in time to the spring when Bambi, Thumper, Flower, and Faline are all seen having grown up to adulthood. They become "twitterpated" over potential mates and Bambi and Faline become a couple. However, their happiness is threatened by Ronno, a buck who's after Faline himself. He fights with Bambi and at first seems to have the upper hand until Bambi somehow manages to wound Ronno in his shoulder and throw him from the cliff on which they were fighting. Ronno falls from the cliff and into a nearby river, from which he is not seen again.

Man enters the forest again, and is responsible for a forest fire that sends all the life in the forest running for refuge in a river. Faline is cornered by hunting dogs while fleeing and is rescued only when Bambi bravely fights them off. Upon escaping the hunting dogs, Bambi takes a tremendous leap across a ravine and is shot by a hunter but only wounded. With the urging of the Great Prince, Bambi fights against the pain of his wound and escapes, reuniting with Faline on a small island, safe from the raging forest fire along with the other animals of the forest.

The film ends with the birth of Bambi and Faline's two fawns, with Bambi standing proudly at the top of the mountain, looking down at the newborn fawns, just as The Prince had done at Bambi's birth.

Reception, popularity, and Bambi II

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This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Bambi" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (July 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Although the film received good reviews, it was criticized for being inappropriate for children because of the death of Bambi's mother as well as the scary violence of the hunting scenes, dog attacks, and the forest fire climax. During it's original release, it did poorly at the box office.

In 2006, a straight-to-VHS/DVD midqual by the name of Bambi II, which follows the death of Bambi's mother and fills the gap that was made when Bambi follows his father into the thicket.

Censorship

The death of Bambi's mother is one of the best-known moments in American film history, a moment so upsetting to certain children that they had to be carried sobbing out of the theater during numerous theatrical presentations. For this reason, and because of the horror and violence of the climactic hunting/forest fire sequence, many critics question the suitability of Bambi for very young audiences. When Bambi was shown during the Christmas period in December 2006 on UK channel ITV 2, the scene of the death of Bambi's Mother and the Prince telling Bambi of her death was edited out. When one takes Bambi together with the other Disney feature films created during the same period of the early 40s, such as the dark Pinocchio, the powerful Fantasia, and the serious Victory Through Air Power, one can see an attempt by Walt Disney to produce films pushing against the stereotype of Disney animation being "children's films". Nonetheless, it wasn't until nearly 40 years later that The Disney Company featured the death of a parent in one of their movies (Tod's mother in The Fox and the Hound), and more than 50 years before it happened again (Mufasa dies in The Lion King). The off-screen villain "man" has been placed #20 on AFI's List of Heroes and Villians.

Controversy and Smokey Bear wildfire prevention

The U.S. Secretary of the Interior has criticized the movie Bambi for propagating the idea that the best way to manage the forest resources within the U.S. was to fight forest fires. The Secretary of the Interior points out that controlled burning is now recognized as more beneficial, and that forest animals, such as Bambi, simply move out of the way of forest fires and, in general, are not killed by them.

In 1942 the animated feature film Bambi was released. Soon after, Walt Disney allowed his characters to appear in fire prevention public service campaigns. However, Bambi was only loaned to the government for a year, so a new symbol was needed, leading to the creation of Smokey Bear.

In 2006,the Ad Council, in partnership with the United States Forest Service, started a series of Public Service Announcement ads that feature footage from Bambi (and more often, Bambi 2) for wildfire prevention. During the ads, as the Bambi footage is shown, the screen will momentarily fade into black with the text "Don't let our forests...become once upon a time", and usually (but not always) ending the ads with Bambi's line "Mother, what we gonna do today?" followed by Smokey Bear saying "Only you can prevent wildfires" as the Smokey logo is shown on the screen.

The ads air on various television networks, and the Ad Council has also put them on Youtube.

Pre-production

Walt Disney attempted to achieve realistic detail in this animated film. The artists heard lectures from animal experts, and visited the Los Angeles Zoo. A pair of fawns (named Bambi and Faline) were shipped from the area of present day Baxter State Park in Maine to the studio so that the artists could see first-hand the movement of these animals. The source of these fawns, from the Eastern United States, was the impetus for the transformation of Felix Salten's roe deer to white-tailed deer. The background of the film was also the Eastern 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.

Distribution

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• August 13 1942 (New York City, New York release)
• August 21 1942 (USA release)
• December 25 1947
• July 3 1957(features the Buena Vista logo and plays in a widescreen format by Cinemascope 55)
• March 25 1966
• June 20 1975
• June 4 1982
• July 15 1988

Bambi was released in theaters in 1942, during World War II and was Disney's 5th full length animated film. The famous art direction of Bambi was due to the influence of Tyrus Wong, a former painter who provided eastern and painterly influence to the backgrounds. Bambi was re-released to theaters in 1947, 1957, 1966, 1975, 1982, and 1988. It was released on VHS in 1989 (Classics Version), 1997 (Masterpiece Collection Version), and digitally remastered and restored for the March 1 2005 Platinum Edition DVD. The Platinum Edition DVD went on moratorium on January 31 2007. The Masterpiece Version was the first Disney Video to be THX certified.

Recycled animation from Bambi in other films

Animation from Bambi has been reused in several other Disney films, especially footage of birds, leaves and generic woodland. For example, one scene in The Fox and the Hound reused footage of the animals running from the rain in Bambi's "Little April Shower" sequence. The most reused footage from Bambi are the few seconds of Bambi's mother looking up from eating grass just before she is killed by the hunter. This footage has been used in hunting scenes in The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book. It is also featured in The Rescuers during the song "Someone's Waiting For You" and in the opening scene of Beauty and the Beast. Even a latter-day Donald Duck short featured Bambi and his mother. They are drinking from a stream and then a bunch of garbage floats past them in the stream and Bambi's mother says to him calmly, "Man is in the forest. Let's dig out." They then leave.

Voice cast

References

1. "AFI's 10 Top 10". American Film Institute. 2008-06-17. Retrieved 2008-06-18. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
2. Unnammed in the movie but referred to both in production documentation and the book
3. Kevin Jackson 'Tears of a fawn', The Independent, Feb. 6, 2005.
4. Walt Disney Collection: Walt's Masterworks — Bambi.
5. The Trouble with Bambi: Walt Disney's Bambi and the American Vision of Nature by Ralph H. Lutts: From 'Forest and Conservation History' 36 (October 1992)
6. Maurice E. Day, Animator, 90; Drew Deer for Movie 'Bambi': Obituary in the New York Times, published May 19, 1983)
7. How They Restored Bambi, Monsters and Critics.
8. IGN.

External links

• Bambi at IMDb
• Template:Bcdb title
• Bambi Special Edition DVD Home Page

Template:Link FA

• Articles lacking sources from July 2008
• Articles needing cleanup from July 2008
• Articles with sections that need to be turned into prose from July 2008
• 1942 films
• Coming-of-age films
• American films
• Children's fantasy films
• Disney animated features canon
• Films about animals
• Films based on children's books
• Films featuring anthropomorphic characters
• Films shot in Technicolor