The video recently went on sale in the States and when it does the same over here, no prizes for guessing that I’ll be near the front of the queue!įor further information, readers are recommended “Bambi – the story and the film” – Ollie Johnston & Frank Thomas, published by Stewart, Taborin and Chang.Easter seems a perfect time to honor my favorite bunny, Thumper, from Walt Disney Pictures Bambi. Thanks to infinite repetitions on ‘Disney Time’, Bambi on ice has become part of everybody’s subconscious but even beyond that, it still has to be regarded as one of the best cartoon films of all time. It’s undoubtedly a masterpiece, although it took ten years to recover all it’s costs.
The finished film opened on August 13th, 1942, more than five years after the project began. Entire sequences went: there was one scene with Bambi and his father finding the corpse of a hunter, killed by the forest fire but test screenings showed people didn’t like this at all! Another scene not included was one that had two leaves contemplating death and the hereafter before being swept off their branch, and overall the length of the film was reduced from over 9,000 feet to 6,259. Animation is expensive work and when ‘Pinocchio’ flopped on release and ‘Fantasia’ was also looking like coming up short, cuts had to be made.
Thumper bambi best scenes movie#
This was thanks to Tyrus Wong, who’d come up from being an in-betweener (artist who ‘fills the blanks’ between master frames), and helped give the forest a ‘magic’ feel, though it’s been argued, with some justification, that this magic was due to the reality – you feel as if you could walk into it.ĭespite the wonderful sequences that were being produced, the movie had problems. The backgrounds in ‘Bambi’ are different from most of Disney’s features, being rendered in a less hyper-realistic way, with expressionist shading to create the atmosphere of the forest. It’s all by suggestion…I just wonder if coming back and seeing her form isn’t just sticking a knife in their hearts.ĭespite this display of moderation the agreed sequence, where Bambi’s father tells him “Your mother can’t be with you anymore”, is still capable of reducing most people, 24-year old ‘zine editors included, to tears. You never come back and show the imprint of the mother. WD: You know she’s dead, but the little guy just comes back…and the snow begins to pick up and he’s crying, “Mother!” and it would just tear their hearts out…this little fellow in the blizzard – and right out of the blizzard comes this stag you know. WD: I was just wondering if we even had to do that? Larry Morey: We come back to the image in the snow. Walt Disney: He doesn’t know where she is and starts coming back, but you don’t come back to her do you? Gradually, however, these problems were overcome, though the eventual version was toned DOWN – it was planned to go back to where she’d been shot and show the marks of her having been dragged away, but this was altered after the following conversation between Walt Disney and two story directors: In the first treatments, the writers had difficulty establishing her as a character making her death seem just like another occurence in Bambi’s life. The section that posed most problems was the death of Bambi’s mother, without doubt the most heart-rending moment in cartoon history (I have a theory that someone’s attitudes to hunting largely depend on whether or not they saw ‘Bambi’ as a child!). This was no bad thing, as the experience gained in giving animals character was vital to ‘Bambi’.ĭave Hurd was brought in as supervising director and he turned the screws on the storyboard team, who’d otherwise probably still be polishing their ideas! He demanded more human elements in the animals, a more caricatured approach and to help the audience identify with Bambi and his friends in the later scenes, the first part became “about a group of children who happened to be animals”. The job proved more difficult than had been imagined, and gradually ‘Bambi’ slipped down Disney’s schedule as first ‘Pinocchio’ and then ‘Fantasia’ overtook it.
The first task was to convert the book into storyboards and the two men in charge of this were Bernard Garbutt, a specialist in drawing animals and Marc Fraser Davis, who had less formal training but was a genius at bringing life and feeling into his drawings.
Thumper bambi best scenes trial#
After some tests and trial footage, he realised this would be impossible and contacted Walt Disney who was excited by the idea, scheduled it to be his studio’s second animated feature and the rights to the movie were transferred to him in April 1937. The rights to Felix Salten’s book were first picked up by Sidney Franklin of MGM who originally planned it as a live-action movie.
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