Bambi (Disney; RKO-Radio) may not be "the best picture I have ever made, and the best ever to come out of Hollywood" (as Walt Disney claims, but it is in many respects the best of his six full-length cartoon movies. The chief hurdle it has to take is the high standard of its predecessors.
Bambi is the brown-eyed, white-scutted fawn of Felix Salten's somewhat candied forest idyl. Disney animates Bambi from birth to buck. He is an appealing, wonderfully articulated little deer, whose progressive discoveries of rain, snow, ice, the seasons, man, love, death, etc. make a neatly antlered allegory. Bambi's rubber-jointed, slack-limbed, coltish first steps in the art of walking are, even for Disney, inspired animation. The undying affection bestowed on him by a young skunk, whom Bambi inadvertently names Flower, is grade-A Disney. His wide-eyed encounter with an old mole who pops up just to pass the time of day (see cut) is typical of a fawnhood full of sylvan surprises.
But Bambi grows up, and with horns he loses his cuteness. He also loses his baby voice, his spots, his mother. The hunters, who kill her, hunt Bambi and his bride, a doe named Faline. A pack of nightmarish hounds with luminous fangs (probably the most terrifying curs since Cerberus) attack them. Then a fire burns up the forest. It also burns up Disney's delicate fantasy.
Bambi is the star, but a puckish, toothy, yellow-nosed rabbit named Thumper almost hops off with the picture. He is a first-rate example of Disney's genius for creating an illusion of reality only to turn it into a fantasy. Thumper goes along being all rabbit, suddenly does something purely human. The shift is hilarious. Thumper's chief accomplishment is a hereditary talent for thumping his long left foot against the earth, a log, or anything else, with the staccato crack of a tommy gun.
Newcomer Thumper carries most of Bambi's comedy. Just a normal growing bunny, he won't eat his greens, and adds sly innuendoes to the maxims his mother makes him recite. As court jester to Bambi, who is a prince and must maintain a reasonable reserve, he is very funny. His inability to keep his itching foot from vibrating while making love to the beauteous Mrs. Thumper is great slapstick. So is the skating lesson he gives Bambi. "Come on," he coaxes, "the water's stiff!"
Edward Plumb's background music is expertly keyed into the production, but none of Bambi's four songs (best: Let's Sing a Gay Little Spring Song) is notable. Some innovations are. For the first time, Disney has done his backgrounds in oils instead of watercolors. The result is striking. The russet reds, browns, bright yellows, make autumn look like autumn. Each season has a special color impact. The colors are softer, more alive and, with the aid of the multiplane camera, give the picture solidity, the forest a three-dimensional depth.
Fantasia's use of color to suggest moods and emotions is repeated in the yellow-white silhouettes of Bambi and his mother fleeing from the hunters in the meadow-symbols of livid fear. When Bambi fights another buck for possession of Faline, the spring day darkens to an ominous brownish red, like drying blood. The battling bucks fight in luminous outline against a wine-dark background.