They don’t make children’s movies like “Bambi” anymore.
This isn’t an appeal to my own nostalgia. I don’t consider myself a big Disney Fan, and I had no history with the film until about a week ago. It’s just an observation. They don’t make movies like “Bambi” anymore. Baby Sunglasses Kids
It’s traditionally animated of course — inked frames on painted backdrops have all but gone the way of the celluloid dinosaur — but there’s something else, some cervine je ne sais quoi that makes “Bambi” feel like the fossil relic of an extinct medium.
“Bambi” isn’t very complicated. That’s not to say that it isn’t deep or artful, but its story is certainly easy to follow. The narrative is light. The scenes are loose. The characters are simple. It is minimally invested in hardline adherence to plot and maximally invested in exploring its rich aesthetics, themes and emotions.
It’s a deceptively simple story about decidedly complex subject matter. It is, I think, a perfect encapsulation of the traits that make for a truly great children’s film.
It’s just really neat to look at, for one. The animation is lively. The painted backgrounds are lush. There’s a real sense of texture to it that’s absent in smoother, shinier cartoons. It’s pleasant on the eyes and technically impressive, of course, but it’s also a little rough and odd and interesting.
Artistry is not wasted on children. Their standards may not be especially high, but their capacity for appreciation is tremendous. I remember pausing my favorite VHS tapes to admire the backdrops. I remember religiously watching behind-the-scenes footage of animators inking frames and sculpting puppets. This stuff was fascinating to me. It made me want to draw pictures and write down stories. It was generative and engrossing. As small as I was, I knew it was important.
Children value good art. They are curious. They’re creative. Their appreciation for craftsmanship is forming in real-time, and great children’s films, animated or otherwise, foster that appreciation.
“This is a movie about relationships between the natural and the constructed. It’s a film about the inevitability of change and the unfairness of it. ”“”
“This is a movie about relationships between the natural and the constructed. It’s a film about the inevitability of change and the unfairness of it. ”
In the case of “Bambi” these aesthetics lend themselves nicely to a narrative that is comfortable with being somewhat slow. I think that’s wonderful. There are, of course, requisite bursts of exciting, technicolored action, but the bulk of the film’s events are minor. They don’t propel anyone into the throes of conflict, nor are they overly stimulating. The film’s barely longer than an hour, and the bulk of it is patient, thoughtful and experiential. It’s nice. It feels nourishing.
The simple plot does wonders here. It is not a bulleted list of tightly connected events that carries the narrative of “Bambi,” but something less concrete; in “Bambi,” that story weight is upheld by the thematic and the emotional.
This is a movie about relationships between the natural and the constructed. It’s a film about the inevitability of change and the unfairness of it. It’s a film about seeing the world for the first time. A child might not pick up on all these concepts — they might not pick up on any of them — but they are present. They’re within a child’s grasp, accessible enough to foster curiosity but complex enough to give them something to chew on as they grow and experience the world for themselves.
Just as children can appreciate deep themes, they can appreciate being made to feel things. “Bambi” meets children at this level. It deals in emotional vignettes that are rich, specific and constantly transforming. Each loose offshoot of the bare plot explores a young deer experiencing new feelings for the first time. Moments of whimsy blend into moments of awe, which melt into bashfulness, fear and amusement. It’s kind of magical.
And then there’s the scene.
The death of Bambi’s mother is wrenching. There is nothing just or graceful about it. An innocent animal is met with violence that comes out of nowhere and happens in an instant. It’s a tear-jerker (and arguably a manipulative one) but it’s seriously affecting.
What gets me the most is the silence. The confirmation of a mother’s passing is not met with a grand emotional swell, but with chilling stillness. It’s almost unbearable. Upon the entrance of Bambi’s father, the Prince, the haunting score abruptly fades into a great, weighty span of noiselessness. This is an extended moment of mandatory reflection, and it is brutal.
It made me tear up as an adult. It would have ruined me as a kid.
There’s something to be said about art for children that deals in measured devastation. The best children’s stories are, almost certainly, the mildly traumatic ones.
Being a child is an upsetting experience. We are small and our emotions are larger than we can understand and the world is rarely sympathetic to that. But these emotions exist. They’re intense. They’re necessary. Learning to grieve cannot happen without grief. Fears cannot be overcome without fear.
Good children’s films play into empathy. They let us grapple with emotions that we are unprepared to grapple with and they allow us to do so mostly without consequence. That’s the beauty of them: they’re fiction. They aren’t real.
It’s good for children to feel sadness sometimes. It’s good for them to be scared and excited and joyous too and isn’t it incredible that we can experience all these things through fictional deer? That’s remarkable. That shouldn’t be shied away from.
The sadness of “Bambi” does not last forever. After the bitterness of winter comes the new life of spring. Time passes. Fawns become stags. The loss never dissipates, but the wound grows less tender. The world is lush and warm and sometimes very cruel, but there is some solace to be found within it: For as long as there are friends to reconnect with and people to love and baby deer in the springtime, life does end when we grieve.
Gerrit Punt PO ’24 also grew up in the middle of the woods. In that regard, he has a lot in common with a baby deer. He is not a child psychologist, nor does he claim to be — another trait he shares with most baby deer.
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