Saturday, June 24, 2006
Bambi
I rented a VHS of BAMBI recently. I've come to the conclusion that Disney's classics should be viewed on VHS. Without having seen any on DVD, let me say firmly I suspect the DVDs are so augmented as to distort the originals. I could be wrong. I wouldn't even be surprised if a typical Disney DVD of, say, CINDERELLA, offers the option of hearing an audio track resembling the one which went with the original release. But, I have a feeling the colors are now too bright. The filmic quality is gone. (I'm projecting here, but aren't MOVIES supposed to be projected?) I can swear that an ad I've seen for the new re-release of SLEEPING BEAUTY has different people doing the voices. I believe Disney issued a re-orchestrated FANTASIA. Disney's a strange company. It releases something in some tweaked form, takes it out of release, re-tweaks it and releases it again and then "restores" it. A lot of companies re-package old classics, but, somehow, Disney seems altogether more willing to break, as opposed to fix. The policy of keeping something OUT of circulation in order to maintain some bogus mystique annoys me, especially as time proves that the stuff done in Walt Disney's lifetime is, on a technical level, at least, world-class art. If Shakespeare had copyrighted THE TEMPEST, would some idiot own the rights now? Luckily, a lot of libraries and video shops purchased those "Limited Edition" re-releases in the mid-eighties, allowing people who know where to look to actually find the "Silly Symphonies" and other more obscure Disney works.
So, I watched BAMBI last night. I'd never seen it before. I know enough about Disney to know he really studied animals carefully before drawing them. BAMBI looks like a watercolor in a hunting lodge come to life. It is, as an impression of nature, stunning. The little animals are a double-threat. They move like actual little animals, but act and sound like children. If it's over-the-top, well, all cartoon kids can't act like Cartman from SOUTH PARK. I knew BAMBI's mother gets killed by hunters, but I was not prepared for the way it was done. There's a scene a little earlier where she tells Bambi to be very careful in an open field. In a slightly later scene she tells Bambi to run. We hear shots. She tells him "Man" has entered the forest. Later, she and Bambi are walking in the snow and shots ring out. All the deer, including a deer-in-chief, if you will are running away. Bambi's mother shouts at him to keep running and not look back. We follow Bambi as he runs and runs. He makes it to the little bit of underbrush where he and his mother live and he turns around and says "We made it. We made it. Mother? Mother?" It was here I expected to see the body of Bambi's mother. Instead, as Bambi walks through an increasingly thick
blizzard, he makes out the face of the patriarch of deers, who says to him, simply, "Your mother won't be coming back." A child below the age of six or so probably won't even notice that BAMBI's mother has died. Later, there's a female quail who panics as the hunter's fire their guns. She finally screams, "I can't take it anymore," flies up and a shot is heard. Her body quickly lands on the ground. Disney doesn't dwell on it and, as the other birds fly away there's a quick cut (if that's the term in animation) to a different scene. I expected BAMBI to be subdued about death, but I didn't expect it to rely as heavily as it did on the intelligence of the viewer. In a cartoon today, at the very least we'd see Bambi's mother dying. In the actual movie (which is from 1942), the last we see of her is the scene in where she's telling Bambi to run and not look back. The quail which gets shot shows no blood, and it is, as a character, very peripheral, being introduced just seconds before being shot. Again, a child might not even notice what's happening, but the death of the quail, for an adult, is pretty scary. When the quail starts saying she wants to get out of the thicket, the other birds are saying, "No, stay perfectly calm. Don't move." Already, movies about the Nazis were being made and certainly audiences would have seen a few movies which had scenes with people hiding from storm troopers. This is not so much a movie about man's destruction of the wild as a war movie about people dealing with war as a force of nature.
This is Disney's truly anthropomorphic flick, his one Aesop fable. It's pretty moving.
So, I watched BAMBI last night. I'd never seen it before. I know enough about Disney to know he really studied animals carefully before drawing them. BAMBI looks like a watercolor in a hunting lodge come to life. It is, as an impression of nature, stunning. The little animals are a double-threat. They move like actual little animals, but act and sound like children. If it's over-the-top, well, all cartoon kids can't act like Cartman from SOUTH PARK. I knew BAMBI's mother gets killed by hunters, but I was not prepared for the way it was done. There's a scene a little earlier where she tells Bambi to be very careful in an open field. In a slightly later scene she tells Bambi to run. We hear shots. She tells him "Man" has entered the forest. Later, she and Bambi are walking in the snow and shots ring out. All the deer, including a deer-in-chief, if you will are running away. Bambi's mother shouts at him to keep running and not look back. We follow Bambi as he runs and runs. He makes it to the little bit of underbrush where he and his mother live and he turns around and says "We made it. We made it. Mother? Mother?" It was here I expected to see the body of Bambi's mother. Instead, as Bambi walks through an increasingly thick
blizzard, he makes out the face of the patriarch of deers, who says to him, simply, "Your mother won't be coming back." A child below the age of six or so probably won't even notice that BAMBI's mother has died. Later, there's a female quail who panics as the hunter's fire their guns. She finally screams, "I can't take it anymore," flies up and a shot is heard. Her body quickly lands on the ground. Disney doesn't dwell on it and, as the other birds fly away there's a quick cut (if that's the term in animation) to a different scene. I expected BAMBI to be subdued about death, but I didn't expect it to rely as heavily as it did on the intelligence of the viewer. In a cartoon today, at the very least we'd see Bambi's mother dying. In the actual movie (which is from 1942), the last we see of her is the scene in where she's telling Bambi to run and not look back. The quail which gets shot shows no blood, and it is, as a character, very peripheral, being introduced just seconds before being shot. Again, a child might not even notice what's happening, but the death of the quail, for an adult, is pretty scary. When the quail starts saying she wants to get out of the thicket, the other birds are saying, "No, stay perfectly calm. Don't move." Already, movies about the Nazis were being made and certainly audiences would have seen a few movies which had scenes with people hiding from storm troopers. This is not so much a movie about man's destruction of the wild as a war movie about people dealing with war as a force of nature.
This is Disney's truly anthropomorphic flick, his one Aesop fable. It's pretty moving.
# posted by Fredwemyss @ 12:59 AM 
