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Bambi

Bambi and the fireBambi on the pond

From Walt's farmyard childhood on, he loved animals. So it's no surprise that he would have wanted to make an animated feature out of Felix Salten's book, "Bambi." Still, as you'd expect, Walt decided to use "Bambi" to bring animation yet another step forward. Instead of creating cute stylized animals -- a task his animators had mastered in "Snow White" -- he decided to go to enormous lengths to achieve realistic detail. In fact, according to Dave Smith's "Disney A to Z," "In striving for realism, the artists heard lectures from animal experts, made field trips to the Los Angeles Zoo, watched specially filmed nature footage shot in the forests of Maine, and even studied the movements of two fawns that were donated to the Studio. The meticulous work was time consuming; even taking care to see that the spots on the fawn's back remained constant meant fewer drawings could be finished in a day." Walt, a man who was rarely tight with a dollar for his work, was notoriously stingy with praise. So his animators well remembered the day he looked at their work and announced, "Fellas, this stuff is pure gold."

WinterBambi in 3D

The backgrounds and creatures in "Bambi" were stunning -- as was the unprecedented realism in the film; even though the death of Bambi's mother takes place off-screen, youngsters often remember that moment in the film for years to come. The time of release, however, during World War II, hurt "Bambi" at the box office. For one thing, the Disney studio no longer had access to many European markets that provided a large portion of its profits. The film didn't do so well at the box office in America, either. As Roy telegrammed his brother after the New York opening of the film, "Fell short of our holdover figure by $4,000. Just came from Music Hall. Unable to make any deal to stay third week. . . . Night business is our problem." What's more, Walt's obvious bias in favor of the "creatures of nature," as he called them -- and against the evil humans in the story -- provoked the outrage of hunters, who proclaimed the movie was "an insult to American sportsmen." But the criticism was short-lived, and the financial shortfall of its first release was more than made up in seven subsequent re-releases.

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