Bambi

^ Sources differ on whether Sutherland actually voiced Young Adult Bambi.[16]

In 1933, Sidney Franklin, a producer and director at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, purchased the film rights to Felix Salten's novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods, intending to adapt it as a live-action film. After years of experimentation, he eventually decided that it would be too difficult to make such a film and he sold the film rights to Walt Disney in April 1937.[17] 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.[17] However, the original novel was written for an adult audience, and was considered too "grim" and "somber" for a regular light-hearted Disney film.[17] The artists also discovered that it would be challenging to animate deer realistically.[18] These difficulties resulted in Disney putting production on hold while the studio worked on several other projects.[17] 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.[17] 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.[17]

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.[18]

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.[19] 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.[18][19] 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.[18] 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.[19] 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.[19] 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.[17]

Although the animators had animated deer in Snow White, they were animated, in the words of Eric Larson, "like big flour sacks".[18] 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.[20] 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.[19][20][21] 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.).[18] 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.[22] 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.[23]

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.[24] However his first sketches were too "busy" as the eye did not know where to focus.[18] 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.[18] 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.[19]

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.[17]

On the initiative of Stephen Greymoming, professor of Native American studies and anthropology at the University of Montana,[33] an Arapaho-language dubbing of the movie was produced in 1994, in collaboration with the Northern Plains Educational Foundation.[34] 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.[35][36] 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.[37] The dubbing was never issued again in any other forms, until it was uploaded on the streaming platform Disney+ in October 2022.[38] Bambi was the first of three Disney movies to receive a dubbing in a Native American language.[38] The next such instance had to wait until 2016, when Pixar's Finding Nemo received a dubbing in Navajo,[39] and then Disney's Moana in Hawaiian two years later.[40] While the first was also made available on Disney+,[38] the latter was only distributed for free in schools in Hawaii, and never received any home media release form.[41]

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.[42] 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."[43] 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."[44] 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.[42]

Today, however, Bambi is viewed as one of the greatest animated films ever made.[45] 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 consensus reads: "Elegantly animated and deeply touching, Bambi is an enduring, endearing, and moving Disney classic."[46] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 91 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[47] Critics Mick Martin and Marsha Porter call the film "the crowning achievement of Walt Disney's animation studio".[48] English film historian Leslie Halliwell wrote that Bambi was "one of Disney's most memorable and brilliant achievements with a great comic character in Thumper and a climactic forest fire sequence that is genuinely thrilling". He concluded that it was "a triumph of the animator's arts".[49]

The film was released during World War II and did not perform as well as hoped.[50] 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."[45] The film earned RKO theatrical rentals of $1,270,000 in the United States and Canada in its initial release.[51][52]

Disney lacked access to much of the European market during the war,[45] 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.[51]

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[53] 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,[54] 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.[55] With grosses from international reissues, the film has a worldwide gross of $267 million.[3]

In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "10 Top 10" – 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.[64] It is also listed in the Top 25 Horror Movies of All Time by Time magazine. Bambi, Time states, "has a primal shock that still haunts oldsters who saw it 40, 50, 65 years ago."[65]

American Film Institute

• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies – Nominated
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains:
  • Man – No. 20 Villain
• AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores – Nominated
• AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition) – Nominated
• AFI's 10 Top 10 – No. 3 Animated film

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.[66]

Set in the middle of Bambi, Bambi II shows the Great Prince of the Forest struggling to raise the motherless Bambi, and Bambi's doubts about his father's love. The film was released direct-to-video on February 7, 2006. While the film was a direct-to-video release in the United States and other countries, including Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan, it was a theatrical release in some countries, including Australia, Austria, Brazil, Dominican Republic, France, Mexico, the United Kingdom and some other European countries.

On January 28, 2020, it was announced that a photorealistic CGI feature-length remake is in development with a script co-written by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Lindsey Beer. Paul Weitz, Chris Weitz, and Andrew Miano will produce the film; a joint-venture production between Walt Disney Pictures, Depth of Field Studios, and Known Universe Productions.[15] The Walt Disney Company described the film as a "companion piece" to The Jungle Book (2016) and The Lion King (2019), as the three films feature wildlife that requires extensive CGI and special effects.[15] On June 13, 2023, it was revealed that Sarah Polley is in talks to direct the film, which is said to be a musical that will feature music from six-time Grammy-winning country star Kacey Musgraves. Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster wrote the most recent draft of the script.[79]