17 thoughts on “Bambi in 2018

  1. Bambi is older than Walt Disney’s 1942 movie. It first appeared as a book written by the Austrian Jew Felix Salten in 1923. Recent scholarship reveals that Felix Salten wrote Bambi specifically for Jewish children and that the entire book is supposed to be about the conditions faced by European Jews at the time with the deer being the Jews and the humans the Gentiles. Its also a Zionist or Jewish nationalist tale because the Great Prince of the Forest is allegory for Theodore Herzl, the man who organized the desperate Jewish nationalist groups into a coherent organization. Bambi is a Jewish children’s book that got universalized by Disney.Report

    1. @leeesq That was a really interesting article, thanks for linking. I would suggest that given the book’s widespread international best seller status before Disneyfication, its universally appealing qualities were recognized by many non-Jewish readers before Disney got hold of it.Report

  2. This morning I woke up to 9 F temperatures and hunks of dead deer puked up all over the living room floor, related to an obvious deer carcass outside the window that wasn’t there last night. I’m not sure what went on, but Bambi must have had a rough night.Report

  3. The problem with depicting deer as cute these days is that nearly every place I have ever lived is currently struggling with the problems of deer overpopulation. So the deer die of starvation in the winter, or of disease, or by getting hit by a car. Since we’ve done away with all the other top predators, population control falls on us. The county in central New Jersey where I lived three decades ago collected 999 deer carcasses from along roadways in 2016. Fontenelle Forest, 1400 acres of heavily wooded park bounded on three sides by the Missouri River and on the fourth by the city of Omaha, sometimes requires that as many as 100 deer per year be removed to maintain the herd at a size that the area will support. Getting the annual cull started was an extremely difficult job, mostly because, “But, but, Bambi…”

    When is Disney going to do a proper remake, with a bloody-faced mountain lion explaining to her kits that killing deer to maintain habitat health is a moral obligation?Report

      1. No, the Lion King was the farce that portrayed hyenas — which tend to be scavengers and don’t kill their own food — as the bad guys and the lions — apex predators — as the good guys. Fuck that noise.Report

        1. Yeah, while the Lion King was magical the first time I watched it I couldn’t help but consider that all the animals rearing, saluting and bowing to the lions were their food. A somewhat odd dynamic. Maybe Lion King is a libertarian movie?Report

  4. The part in the middle where you describe how camera shots just linger reminds me of Kubrick. (I don’t think I’ve seen Bambi all the way through)Report

    1. Bambi wasn’t the first film where Disney had their multiplane camera running, but it was the first film where they had its full capabilities available. While the multiplane does some things incredibly well, speed is not its forte — so those long, lingering shots. Disney Studio’s solution to the speed problem didn’t emerge until their Deep Canvas software for Tarzan.Report

    1. The pace thing reminded me of Godless, a new Merflix miniseries I watched last month. It reminded me of an old movie precisely because it was so very lingering in its pace, and so taken with its surroundings. I loved it.Report

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