Earth Day Film Friday Special: Walt Disney's 'Bambi'

Earth Day may have been created in 1970, launching today’s modern environmentalism movement, but there have always been voices pushing for humanity to respect the gifts nature has given us.

Nearly 50 years before Earth Day was born, Austrian author Felix Salten published Bambi, A Life In The Woods. It tells the simple story of a roe deer as he grows up, falls in love and learns about the impact of man on the forest.

In 1942, Walt Disney released his animated adaptation, simply titled Bambi. His team changed several details, most importantly making Bambi and his family white-tailed deer. But the main idea was still there. We see what life is like in the forest without humans and the tragedy that can strike when we get in the way.

The film runs an astonishingly short 70 minutes and there is little plot. Bambi moves like a piece of music, with individual movements that go from extreme drama to light comedy. Bambi is Disney’s first attempt at telling an incredibly realistic story, even if it does involve talking animals. But they so rarely talk and because it is told completely from their perspective, it doesn’t feel unrealistic.

This makes the decision to never show man even more vital. Man hovers over the film like a demon, but the fact that animals fear man without even seeing us makes man even scarier. We are the monsters here. The fact that Frank Churchill’s three-note theme for man was appropriated by John Williams into the Jaws theme should come as no surprise.

But is Bambi really a rallying cry for environmentalism? The film was made long before green house gases entered the popular vernacular. So the danger here isn’t our technology but our carelessness. Disney, who made no such drastic political statement in any of his earlier films, is focused more on man’s ignorance of our own strength. That this carelessness has an incredible impact on Bambi and his forest friends is just one thing that our nature can cause. It is a rallying cry to get us to think about our actions and the impact it has.

Despite that, one should never lose sight of the fact that Bambi is more about how the audience can relate to animals. While anthropomorphic animals were important in Dumbo and Pinocchio, they weren’t presented as realistically as they are here. In Bambi, the audience is forced to only have animal characters to connect to and it works so well thanks to the animation. The story is also important, as we see Bambi going through the same growing pains that children go through. The loss of his mother is so shocking because we already have built a connection with her as strong as the one we have with Bambi.

Bambi doesn’t want us to protect the earth because forest fires can damage the earth. It wants us to protect the earth because we share it with these amazing creatures that have as much feeling as we do.