Top 5 Fun Facts About Bambi

In Disney’s early days, it was common practice to reuse bits of animation in different movies to save the artists time and the company money. Because creating each cel was so time-consuming, it made sense to slightly alter existing illustrations rather than creating new ones from scratch. In fact, this has been done with “Bambi” more than any other film, especially when it comes to leaves and birds. Images of Bambi’s mother in particular have popped up in “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Sword in the Stone,” and “The Jungle Book.” She can also be spotted with her son in “The Rescuers.” Huh, we wonder where Bernard and Bianca were when Bambi’s mom needed rescuing?

During the inception of animated features, adults were typically recruited to provide all the voices, even when it came to portraying children. This is still common today, as children’s voices are bound to change over time. Walt Disney had a different idea for this film, however, insisting that Bambi and the other woodland creatures be voiced by young children. In fact, Thumper’s character was largely formed around the child who provided his voice, using his distinctive intonation to inspire the lines that the writers came up with. This made it all the more significant when Bambi and his friends ultimately grew up, marking the beginning of a new chapter in their lives.

The animators assigned to work on “Bambi” put in a lot of work to ensure that their on-screen depictions of deer would be as accurate and realistic as possible. The team knew that deer would be particularly difficult to use as characters because of the way their facial features are formed. Not only did the animators take trips to the Los Angeles Zoo to study the critters, but Disney also had a small menagerie set up in the studio where ducks, rabbits, owls, skunks, and two baby fawns were kept for the illustrators to observe. Of course, the fawns were named Bambi and Faline.

“Bambi” runs for an hour and ten minutes, which isn’t much shorter than the typical Disney movie. The actual script, however, was only a handful of pages long. The entirety of the film’s dialogue makes up less than a thousand words in total, which makes sense considering how many quiet and ambient scenes there are in the film. Disney used a similar technique in 2008’s “Wall-E” when they included almost no dialogue at all in the movie’s first act. It just goes to show that when it comes to animation, sometimes showing is better than telling.

While most Disney movies and children’s movies in general have clear villains to outline the divide between good and evil, the antagonist in “Bambi” is a little different. The faceless threat in this film is “man,” but humans never actually appear on screen. In the movie, characters utter the phrase, “man in the forest,” to warn others that there are predators nearby. However, in the Disney studio, this expression took on a whole different meaning. The crew would reportedly whisper it when Walt was coming down the hallway to warn the group to get to work.