GROSS/33 1942 - follow the deer
Walt Disney, red in tooth and claw
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
BAMBI, DAVID HAND, WALT DISNEY, WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS, 1942, 70 MINUTES.
In Walt Disney’s pioneering wildlife documentary Bambi, the top-grossing film of 1942, we follow the lifecycle of a male deer, from birth to the assumption of dominance in the herd. We learn about the growth and maturation of several species - rabbits, deer and a stripey one that must be a skunk or something. We’re in a wooded setting somewhere in America (the location is never actually stated but all the animals have American accents so it’s probably a safe assumption that they’re in the USA).
The movie begins with touching shots of the baby deer - named Bambi and received by the other animals as a prince - with its mother. Bambi’s newborn awkwardness entertains all the other animals, including a large number of birds, moles, mice, squirrels, chipmunks and a very old owl. Time passes and as he grows Bambi is introduced by his attentive mother to the harsh realities of life in the forest: hunger during a long Winter, fire and the ever-present threat from hunters.
Bambi learns fast - about the meadow, a huge open area with much good grass to eat but also a place of terrible danger; about birds, streams, snow and butterflies; about the dominant stag - the Great Prince of the Forest - respected by all the forest creatures for his courage, wisdom and longevity; and about the regular presence in the forest of organised groups of hunters.
‘Man’ is never seen but we know his presence through the sound of his guns and the traces he leaves. In a famous and affecting scene, Bambi’s mother is shot and killed by a hunter - out of shot - as she urges Bambi on to safety in a thicket. We cry. The dominant stag - we later learn he’s Bambi’s father - steps in and watches over Bambi from here on. He’s not what you’d call emotionally available, though, saying only “your mother can’t be with you any more.”
In an important sequence the owl, whose wisdom gives him high status in the woods, teaches the now adolescent Bambi and his friends Thumper the rabbit and Flower the, er, skunk (is it a skunk?), about mating and the springtime phenomenon of ‘twitterpation’, which is the owl’s word for coming into season or the rut. Soon the three male creatures are paired up with new mates. It turns out females of all three species flutter their eyelids, avert their faces in a sort of coquettish way. They seem to be a bit more up for it, if you see what I mean.
The males are flustered. They blush and look stupid. Thumper’s state of arrousal is indicated by a kind of spasm - an involuntary, sped-up version of his thumping the ground thing. Bambi initially backs away from Faline, the doe who has set her eyes on him. After a while, though, mutual attraction is signalled by a kind of nightclub clarinet on the orchestral soundtrack.
Bambi, being a deer, has to fight for his girlfriend and triumphs in a dramatic and highly-stylised battle with Ronno, an older stag, which ends when Bambi throws the loser from a high cliff. Blimey. In this moment we see him assuming the role of adult and leader.
Between these documentary sequences there are several spellbinding tableaux, gorgeous musical interludes. Forest scenes - rushing streams, breeze in the trees and moonlight on the meadow. These sequences are a showcase for the most advanced animation possible at the time. Disney’s multiplane camera in full effect. Rich, three-dimensional scenes, with focus shifting between planes and constant motion across the whole frame - an almost unimaginably complex project in a pre-computer context - and this is only the fifth Disney animated feature.
In these sequences we’re in a different world. We slip out - as if into a dream - of the cute, anthropomorphic world of the rabbits and the squirrels and the moles and ducks and so on into a darker and more serious world. In these almost Wagnerian passages Disney - and his background artist Tyrus Wong, an illustrator known for his impressionistic paintings of nature - claims for his art something beyond the simple logic of his fairytale sources. This is twenty years before Silent Spring but there’s a sense of nature as a fragile unity.
And these interludes are almost product demonstrations for the studio’s fast-developing artistry - basically showing off, saying to his rivals - “go on, give it a try, you’ll never catch up.” Audiences must have watched these rich, highly-worked sequences in awe. Animation had only very recently graduated from the black-ink line-art of the first era. It must have been a little like the impression made by the first stop-motion monsters or the arrival of CGI.
At the end of the movie Bambi, now a full-grown stag with an impressive set of antlers, conspicuously replaces the Great Prince. There’s no battle, no clash of antlers, though. The old stag, in silhouette at the top of a cliff, just walks away into the forest. The orchestral soundtrack surges. Bambi’s in charge now.
Many people think that Disney’s golden age actually ended with Bambi. Mark Greif in the LRB thinks that the wildly inventive Walt Disney actually made himself obsolete with the string of extraordinary creative and production advances that he introduced in this period. This doesn’t seem implausible and has probably been repeated on several occasions since then - in the early days of Pixar, for instance, during which a small team of brilliant technologists and animators reinvented the form, only to lose their edge as everyone else emulated them.
The story of Bambi’s distinctive, impressionistic look - washes of deep colour, slow pans through moody, dimly-lit scenes with landscape features indicated rather than drawn in detail - is really the story of an artist who’d immigrated from China in 1920. Tyrus “Ty” Wong had started work at Disney in 1938 as an inbetweener and been brought into the Bambi team after Walt himself saw some paintings he’d made of deer in a landscape. He essentially defined the movie’s sophisticated, modern style - I reckon there’s something of the Fauves here. It’s pretty clear that straightforward anti-Chinese racism kept him from the fame and success he ought to have enjoyed, though - he wound up painting promotional art for the studios and Hallmark greetings cards - he lived to 106.
I watched Bambi on Disney+. It’s also on Amazon Prime Video and there’s a Blu-Ray.
I’ve written about two other golden age Disney features: 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and 1940’s Pinocchio.
There’s a men’s rights vibe here - females are sweetly predatory, males confused. Bambi may be a kind of hymn to old-fashioned masculinity - perhaps also to heterosexuality.
Bambi was claimed in the years after its release to be left-wing propaganda and an early example of Hollywood environmental activism. Hunters called for it to be banned (Hitler had banned the German novel it was based on). I read that Žižek thinks it’s a crypto-fascist text (although I can’t find a decent reference for this).
Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list and here’s another top-grossing list.