Regardless, Bambi puts up a good fight against Man and his hunting dogs when they invade his forest, and manages to escape the woods alive with his family when Man’s hubris catches up to him. We’re just left to assume that it all happened offscreen, since the death of his mother was the death of his innocence. We never see Bambi grieve and move on from the mother who meant so much to him and got torn away from him, we never never him adjust to living with his somewhat creepy father that he knows nothing about, and we never see him start to transform from a fearful child to a self-assured young adult, even in montage. It’s a pretty effective arc, but it’s not an incredibly satisfying one, since “Bambi” skips over some of the most important steps. Bambi’s character arc is this film is your classic coming-of-age story: loving his mom, making friends, exploring nature, suffering loss, romancing girls, fighting rivals, and having a final confrontation with Man. He’s always been written as a very kind and sensitive deer and he still is as an adult, so I like that it never makes him any less of a capable prince when his friends need him.īambi is a rather unconventional hero, especially compared to his father, who is a more stoic, masculine, and straightforwardly heroic stag. Needless to say, this is the best version of Bambi. He’s now a competent, knowledgeable young adult and for the first time in the movie, he becomes a proactive character as well as a reactive one. He’s still a bashful soul, but he’s gained confidence. During the last third of the movie, Bambi has a characterization shift. For the first two-thirds of the film, Bambi’s primary function is to react to things, so he’s a pretty cute if unremarkable blank slate character. Like all kids, Bambi is greatly interested in the world around him, and he tries to absorb everything nature and his mother have to teach him. He’s a spirited, energetic young deer when he’s left to his own devices, but he can be timid, bashful, and easily startled around others.
#FIGHTING THUMPER BAMBI MOVIE#
The rest of the film is the aforementioned scenes of the animals frolicking and doing zany forest things, so as you’d imagine, there are quite a few lulls and dry spots in the movie between standout sequences, though the highs of the film are pretty high.īambi is a young deer fawn living in a majestic forest in North America. A good story needs conflict, that’s a basic rule of storytelling, but “Bambi” has almost none save for the three scenes involving Man and the brief fight Bambi has with Ronno. The second, and arguably largest, problem “Bambi” has is that there is almost no conflict for the majority of the film. Bambi and his family in particular are kept as blank slates until the last twenty-five minutes of the movie, when the film time-jumps to Bambi being a badass young deer prince, which is easily the best stretch of the movie. Very few of the characters we encounter in this film are defined, because “Bambi” is much more interested in the day-to-day life of the forest community as a whole (which does receive a strong pay-off later on). Scenes of the forest animals frolicking, being precocious and inquisitive and generally doing random routines is strewn throughout the film in place of character development and progression, so the audience can see the sort of world the forest animals inhabit. What little dialogue the forest animals receive is bland and perfunctory and informs little about their personalities (save for Thumper’s and Friend Owl’s), and neither do their actions really. Like I said, “Bambi” is a nature film and the characters aren’t really meant to be characters so much as wild animals, so they’re deliberately kept as ciphers. For one example, the characterization in “Bambi” is wafer-thin. This is a great idea and it makes for a remarkable film, but there are several shortcomings in the execution. It was an experiment in trying to tell a film, and more specifically a nature film, with a limited amount of dialogue – letting the animation and the score carry the movie. “Bambi” was one of Walt Disney’s most ambitious and experimental movies, as well as the last film of the golden era.
But as a story and a film experience, “Bambi” is more of a mixed bag. Because as a work of art, “Bambi” is beautiful, charming, intricate and mesmerizing, and there’s a certain quaintness to watching a young deer prince grow up in his bountiful forest. My experience with this movie has always been watching it, thinking that it’s nice and pleasant, and then forgetting a lot of it not long afterwards. I first saw “Bambi” not long before I discovered “ Lady And The Tramp“, in the latter half of 2005. Boy, do I have some mixed feelings about “Bambi”, though most of them are positive.
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