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Yes, that’s right. This is a review of Bambi, the delightful animated movie from Walt Disney. In today’s world there is simply too much DEI, the message, and pandering. So let us go back to a simpler time. A time when traumatizing kids was OK, but transitioning them wasn’t.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Bambi from beginning to end before. I found a list of all of the Disney animated movies, from Snow White and the Seven Non-Height People of Indigenous Culture to the present.
As I went through the list, I realized there were a good few movies I’ve never seen. I obviously know of them, but just never got around to watching them. Now, being the sick and twisted psycho I am, I did want to see Bambi’s mum getting shot. I wanted to see how it was handled.
The Story
There is a thin story through the movie:
The story of a young deer growing up in the forest.
That is pretty much it. OK, I didn’t expect a subplot about vampires or how Bambi was being secretly trained for a secret military assassination program. The story is just that simple.
Bambi is born (not shown), makes friends, has a harsh winter, and eventually has kids of his own (again, not shown). I found this so wonderfully refreshing. I didn’t have to see the paused frame from Snow White which explained how the forest got there. I didn’t have to watch a random episode of Bear in the Big Blue House to understand anything. It didn’t need any of that.
I Promised Myself I Wouldn’t Cry
On the one hand, Bambi is a wonderfully beautiful movie. The animation is all painstakingly hand-drawn, the voice characterization is nicely done and it is a work of art. The first act settles you into a very cute forest, with lovely woodland creatures.
Bambi stumbles around and learns to talk. Little Thumper likes to stomp and make a little noise. Even the skunk is cute and loves the flowers. Everything is joyous here and I’m happy to be watching.
Talk about a false sense of security. Things start to go wrong when *spoilers* Bambi’s mother is shot by a hunter (again, disappointingly not shown).
I was expecting it, I knew it was coming, but it’s still horrible to watch. They don’t show his mother’s brains splattered all over the place, but you do get Bambi wandering around calling for his mother. Even a rough, tough kind of guy like me may have had “something in his eye”.
Things just get worse for him after that. His dad kind of leaves him to it. He finds love but has to defend her against a pack of wild dogs, then his dad dies as the forest burns down. It’s almost like out of the frying pan into another frying pan.
Sick And Twisted
As I was watching the movie, I had a train of thought developing. Walt Disney was a sicko! You take your kids to go and see a movie like this, act one is all nice and cute, only to have them traumatized when his mum gets shot. What the hell Walt?
However, as it went on, I started thinking that all this was a good thing. We all have to face death at some point in time, a pet, a family member, a loved one. It’s a trauma we all have to deal with, so why not start them early? I concluded that maybe Walt was doing all the kids a favor.
If you can deal with Bambi’s mum being shot, you can deal with death in real life. Today, kids, and most adults, can’t deal with being offended. If something upsets them, they will scream and shout until said thing is cancelled and everyone is “protected” from the nastiness.
This isn’t a good thing. We live in a world where there is nastiness and, sorry to break this to you, but you have to deal with it like an adult. Watching something like Bambi sets people up young to be able to deal with this kind of thing in a mature and adult fashion. Yes, you might shed a few tears, but that’s OK. It’s part of being human.
Old Fashioned
Another thing about the movie was how Bambi found love. At first, he was very embarrassed and clumsy. They started to fall in love and he put his life on the line to save her from a pack of dogs. At the end of the movie, a new year starts and he has two new little kids. They are ready to start their own lives in the forest.
It seems today that things like this, family values, the “nuclear family” are becoming a thing of the past. In movies nowadays, it’s mostly single-parent families. Women certainly don’t need no man or a family to be happy. This is not a good thing, having a strong family unit is good. There is nothing wrong with having loving parents and a couple of kids.
Overall
Watching Bambi for the first time was quite an eye-opener, especially in this day and age. People on social media are pandered too, snowflakes win the day by screaming loudly and the entire entertainment industry has been hemorrhaging money because of it.
A movie like Bambi would have never been made today, if it did, it would have been cancelled and boycotted in a heartbeat. This is not a good thing. Kids need to learn to deal with trauma, they need to learn how to cope with sadness.
Bambi is a beautiful movie and I’m glad I watched it.
That all got a bit serious, so here is the 1969 classic short, Bambi vs Godzilla.
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