The Trouble with Bambi: Walt Disney's Bambi and the American Vision of Nature

Walt Disney's influence is so pervasive in American culture that it often goes unrecognized. It is easy to overlook the obvious. "All the world is watching the United States," proclaimed a bumper sticker, "and all the United States is watching Walt Disney." A pop-psychologist put it another way. "After all," she wrote, "Disney cartoons are a shared cultural heritage that predate Beaver Cleaver and Howdy Doody. They are the beginning of our global media village.... For better or worse, Uncle Walt pioneered the notion of a standardissue childhood memory." Disney's animal characters, in particular, are truly "a part of our cultural DNA."1 One of these characters, Bambi, has played and continues to playa key role in shaping American attitudes about and understanding of deer and woodland life. It is difficult to identify a film, story, or animal character that has had a greater influence on our vision of wildlife than the hero of Walt Disney's 1942 animated feature, Bambi. It has become perhaps the single most successful and enduring statement in American popular culture against hunting. An examination of this cinematic statement will reveal some of the ideas underlying the present debate between those who support sport hunting and those who seek its end. The film was based on Bambi: A Life in the Woods, written in 1926 by Felix Salten (pen name of the Austrian novelist, journalist, and theater critic, Siegmund Salzmann), and published in the United States in 1928. Whittaker Chambers' superb English translation reflected his own deep, aesthetic love of nature. The film's success was built on the foundation of a fine book, on superb animation that was scripted and designed by people who knew how to appeal to the interests of the viewing public, and on Disney's extraordinary marketing machine that has promoted Bambi for the past fifty years. In the process, Disney's Bambi acquired a content and character that are distinctly its own, despite its many similarities to Salten's original novel. The Disney Version of Bambi