Bambi and the Disney Way of Death
by David Jays
NOVEMBER 26, 2009 TAGS:
Two deer tentatively leave the forest in midwinter to explore an open plain. Deprived of sheltering foliage, they appear fearfully exposed. Shots ring out. The distraught fawn runs for safety, but his mother doesn’t follow. Snow blurs his vision until a paternal voice intones: “Your mother can’t be with you anymore. Come, my son.”
The scene of Bambi’s bereavement is a notorious episode in the Disney canon, the stark tragedy in this 1942 film. Modern parents debate the darkness in new-wave children’s movies like Fantastic Mr. Fox or Where the Wild Things Are. (Maurice Sendak, author of the latter story, brusquely dismisses their concern: “I would tell them to go to hell. That’s a question I will not tolerate.”) Yet Disney, rending the maternal bond almost 70 years ago, is arguably far more brutal, disdaining the playfulness of these latest movies.
Disney is sincerely sentimental, as raw as he is saccharine. No wonder film historian David Thomson calls Bambi “maybe the most daring film he ever made, as well as the grossest example of anthropomorphic garbage.”According to transcripts of the story meetings, Disney knew exactly what he was doing, gloating to his team, “You’ll tear their hearts out when the guy comes back yelling ‘Mother!’” And indeed, critic Pauline Kael wrote in 1970 that “I have never heard children screaming in fear at any of those movies we’re always told they should be protected from as they screamed at Bambi and Dumbo ... these movies really hit children where it counts.”
The film and its resonant crimes against motherhood had a painstaking gestation and a complex legacy. Based on a novel by Felix Saltern, its impulse towards authenticity involved a five-year production process to produce its lyrical environment. An artist spent months filming the Maine woods as reference material, and a small menagerie arrived at the studio for study. Even so, you can’t coerce nature. The young fawns supplied as models soon became tame, too comfortable with studio life to respond as wild beasts.
Death enters this arcadia, but only through human hunters. In Bambi, animals don’t prey on one another: Even the owl isn’t tempted to munch one of the toothsome small birds or squishy little rodents that gambol around him. Disney didn’t like to discuss death (“not an acceptable topic,” according to a colleague), and he hated funerals – he even avoided his eldest brother’s ceremony. But the terror barely suppressed in life insistently sneaks into the films: in the sleep-deaths suffered by Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and of course in Bambi’s wrenching loss.
Cinema messes with the psyche: It infiltrates our dreaming and activates our fears. There’s a surprising symbiosis between Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, cinema’s teasing sadist. Hitchcock used Disney’s cartoon Who Killed Cock Robin? in Sabotage (1936), to counterpoint a grieving mother wandering through a merry movie audience. The animator Ub Iwerks, who created Mickey Mouse’s early cartoon Steamboat Willie, later devised special effects for Hitchcock’s The Birds, and the director, famously cavalier towards his stars, also envied Disney’s cast relations: “If he doesn’t like them, he tears them up.”
Walt may have been, as film critic Jonathan Romney has it, “a propagandist for the nuclear family,” but his own biography was more complicated. His relations with his parents were uneasy. His father, Elias, was irascible and fearsomely frugal. Flora Disney played peacemaker, and Walt perhaps idealised her, while recognising that she could rarely divert his father’s wrath. This famously difficult artist may have felt that he was his own invention.
Disney’s films are undeniably weird about mothers. Dumbo’s mother is locked up, Pinocchio lacks one entirely, while the maternal instinct curdles in stories drawn from fairy tales. Snow White’s villainous stepmother is both icy beauty and cackling hag, intent on murder. Bambi, however, is full of anodyne mothers – a herd of Stepford beasts contentedly putters along with their cubs and chicks (where are all the fathers? Do they commute to hunt and gather?). But the maternal bond truly interests Disney only when under threat. The little deer’s mother is less a character than an enveloping maternal instinct – a vague presence but an awesome, aching absence.
The studio was already preparing Bambi when Flora Disney died from carbon monoxide poisoning in 1938. According to biographer Neal Garber, “it may have been the most shattering moment of Walt Disney’s life ... he was inconsolable.” He refused to discuss the death, but instructed the artists creating Pinocchio to delete all references to the wife of woodcarver Geppetto, making him a bachelor. Bambi’s trauma may have been Disney’s own.
Released in the middle of World War II, Bambi is scarred by human cruelty – men heedlessly slaughter deer and ignite a terrifying forest fire. But Bambi’s mother doesn’t die in vain: She quickly became a beacon for environmentalists. Historian Ralph Lutts calls Bambi “the single most successful and enduring statement in American popular culture against hunting.” “Bambi environmentalism” suggests a sentimental but often popularly effective engagement; the Bambi Bucket, a vast canvas container of water used to fight forest fires, was so named because, the manufacturer explains, “it saves the Bambis in the forest.”
In The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (2008), David Whitley argues that Bambi “inspired conservation awareness and laid the emotional groundwork for environmental activism.” As early as 1943, in the wake of the film’s release, a proposed deer cull in Wisconsin was abandoned due to public protest, and the animated hero’s limpid eyes have haunted debate over population control ever since.
Bambi’s tippy-hooved entry into environmental politics may have been as conflicted as its role in child psychology – almost crass in its sensitivity, upsetting us even as it seeks to comfort. In its tangle of motive and effect it represents the uniquely complex Disney way of death.
The scene of Bambi’s bereavement is a notorious episode in the Disney canon, the stark tragedy in this 1942 film. Modern parents debate the darkness in new-wave children’s movies like Fantastic Mr. Fox or Where the Wild Things Are. (Maurice Sendak, author of the latter story, brusquely dismisses their concern: “I would tell them to go to hell. That’s a question I will not tolerate.”) Yet Disney, rending the maternal bond almost 70 years ago, is arguably far more brutal, disdaining the playfulness of these latest movies.Disney is sincerely sentimental, as raw as he is saccharine. No wonder film historian David Thomson calls Bambi “maybe the most daring film he ever made, as well as the grossest example of anthropomorphic garbage.”According to transcripts of the story meetings, Disney knew exactly what he was doing, gloating to his team, “You’ll tear their hearts out when the guy comes back yelling ‘Mother!’” And indeed, critic Pauline Kael wrote in 1970 that “I have never heard children screaming in fear at any of those movies we’re always told they should be protected from as they screamed at Bambi and Dumbo ... these movies really hit children where it counts.”
The film and its resonant crimes against motherhood had a painstaking gestation and a complex legacy. Based on a novel by Felix Saltern, its impulse towards authenticity involved a five-year production process to produce its lyrical environment. An artist spent months filming the Maine woods as reference material, and a small menagerie arrived at the studio for study. Even so, you can’t coerce nature. The young fawns supplied as models soon became tame, too comfortable with studio life to respond as wild beasts.
Death enters this arcadia, but only through human hunters. In Bambi, animals don’t prey on one another: Even the owl isn’t tempted to munch one of the toothsome small birds or squishy little rodents that gambol around him. Disney didn’t like to discuss death (“not an acceptable topic,” according to a colleague), and he hated funerals – he even avoided his eldest brother’s ceremony. But the terror barely suppressed in life insistently sneaks into the films: in the sleep-deaths suffered by Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, and of course in Bambi’s wrenching loss.
Cinema messes with the psyche: It infiltrates our dreaming and activates our fears. There’s a surprising symbiosis between Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, cinema’s teasing sadist. Hitchcock used Disney’s cartoon Who Killed Cock Robin? in Sabotage (1936), to counterpoint a grieving mother wandering through a merry movie audience. The animator Ub Iwerks, who created Mickey Mouse’s early cartoon Steamboat Willie, later devised special effects for Hitchcock’s The Birds, and the director, famously cavalier towards his stars, also envied Disney’s cast relations: “If he doesn’t like them, he tears them up.”Walt may have been, as film critic Jonathan Romney has it, “a propagandist for the nuclear family,” but his own biography was more complicated. His relations with his parents were uneasy. His father, Elias, was irascible and fearsomely frugal. Flora Disney played peacemaker, and Walt perhaps idealised her, while recognising that she could rarely divert his father’s wrath. This famously difficult artist may have felt that he was his own invention.
Disney’s films are undeniably weird about mothers. Dumbo’s mother is locked up, Pinocchio lacks one entirely, while the maternal instinct curdles in stories drawn from fairy tales. Snow White’s villainous stepmother is both icy beauty and cackling hag, intent on murder. Bambi, however, is full of anodyne mothers – a herd of Stepford beasts contentedly putters along with their cubs and chicks (where are all the fathers? Do they commute to hunt and gather?). But the maternal bond truly interests Disney only when under threat. The little deer’s mother is less a character than an enveloping maternal instinct – a vague presence but an awesome, aching absence.
The studio was already preparing Bambi when Flora Disney died from carbon monoxide poisoning in 1938. According to biographer Neal Garber, “it may have been the most shattering moment of Walt Disney’s life ... he was inconsolable.” He refused to discuss the death, but instructed the artists creating Pinocchio to delete all references to the wife of woodcarver Geppetto, making him a bachelor. Bambi’s trauma may have been Disney’s own.
Released in the middle of World War II, Bambi is scarred by human cruelty – men heedlessly slaughter deer and ignite a terrifying forest fire. But Bambi’s mother doesn’t die in vain: She quickly became a beacon for environmentalists. Historian Ralph Lutts calls Bambi “the single most successful and enduring statement in American popular culture against hunting.” “Bambi environmentalism” suggests a sentimental but often popularly effective engagement; the Bambi Bucket, a vast canvas container of water used to fight forest fires, was so named because, the manufacturer explains, “it saves the Bambis in the forest.” In The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (2008), David Whitley argues that Bambi “inspired conservation awareness and laid the emotional groundwork for environmental activism.” As early as 1943, in the wake of the film’s release, a proposed deer cull in Wisconsin was abandoned due to public protest, and the animated hero’s limpid eyes have haunted debate over population control ever since.
Bambi’s tippy-hooved entry into environmental politics may have been as conflicted as its role in child psychology – almost crass in its sensitivity, upsetting us even as it seeks to comfort. In its tangle of motive and effect it represents the uniquely complex Disney way of death.
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Anonymous wrote on November 26, 2009 4:59am
Mama! [Report Comment]
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