Bambi: sweetness turns 80

This Sunday, August 21, marks the 80th anniversary of the premiere of bambi. She arrived in Argentina on March 3, 1943, and since then the sound of that gunshot in the snow, which puts an end to the life of Bambi’s mother, haunts boys and girls at all latitudes of the planet.

Apart from the theory that would indicate it Walt Disneyto design the scenarios of bambitraveled to Argentina in 1941 and was inspired by the forests of Bariloche, where the famous home of Walt Disney is located within the National Park The Myrtlesthe animated film nominated for 3 Oscars – music, song (Love is a song) and the sound has become a classic.

Much has been said about one of Disney’s first animated gems. When is the live action version?

Here are some curiosities

• bambi It was Walt Disney’s favorite of all of his animated films.

• “The man is in the woods” was a slogan in the film and a slogan used by Disney employees when Walt Disney walked down the hall from the studios.

• Unusual for the time, Walt Disney insisted that children recite the voices of animals when they were small, rather than using adults to imitate young people.

• The Austrian writer Felix Salten (his real name was Siegmund Salzmann), author of the novel from which the film is based, worked in an insurance company and started writing out of boredom. The inspiration for his novel came from a trip to Italy, when he was fascinated by the Italian word “child”. Hence the title.

• Felix Salten sold the film rights to the original novel for just $ 1,000.

• In the novel, Bambi and Faline are first cousins. Faline is the daughter of Aunt Ena, the sister of Bambi’s mother. Walt Disney probably ruled out this detail due to a first cousin mating it would be considered incest.

• Two asteroids are named after Bambi and Thumper (Drum, the rabbit).

• The first and one of the few Disney movies where none of the characters sang the songs. Each song was sung off-screen by a soloist or choir. It was also Walt Disney Animation Studios’ only non-musical film until The night of cold noses (or 101 Dalmatians), from 1961, released 19 years later, and the only non-musical film with songs sung in the background up to Tarzan (1999) only released 57 years later.

• In December 2018, a Missouri poacher was sentenced to one year in prison for illegally killing deer for trophies. As part of the penalty, I had to see this movie once a month.

• The film lost money in theaters during the first few weeks of release, but began to recoup its cost (over $ 2,000,000) during its re-release in 1947.

• Its collection worldwide in theaters totals US $ 267,447,150. To give a close example and bridge the gap and the price of tickets for 80 years, Light yearfrom Pixar and Disney, it has grossed $ 225,414,041 this year worldwide, since opening in June.

• It lasts 69 minutes which, if today is a strange thing for an animated film, it was also at the time. Snow White (1937) lasts 83 minutes, and Pinocchio (1940), 88 minutes. The reason: For cost-saving reasons, 12 minutes of the film were cut before the final animation.

• The data on the time taken for filming differ a lot, but range from 5 to 7 years. But if you count from the beginning, it took almost 9 years: the first job was not done by Walt Disney. In 1933, MGM director Sidney Franklin bought the film rights to the story and planned to make it with the actors. He then contacted Walt Disney, who begins to focus bambi in December 1936. Much of the shooting was in 1940.

• For this reason, even if it was thought of as the second Disney feature film after Snow Whitethe pursuit of perfection and realism delayed the project, and so on Pinocchio (1940), Fantasy (1940), the extravagant dragon (1941) and Dumbo (1941) were first released bambi.

• One of the reasons for the film’s production delays was that Walt Disney and his team kept coming up with ideas for new scenes and characters, spent time developing them, and then had to discard them, because they didn’t really fit the film. An example: in one scene Bambi stepped on an anthill and ants came out. In the end it was decided that the whole scene was irrelevant to the plot and they discarded all work done for it.

• “Man”, the hunter who shoots and kills Bambi’s mother, was ranked 20th on the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Heroes and Villains list and is the only character on the list not to appear on screen. .

• There was a planned scene where the man dies in the forest fire he started. It was supposed to represent “poetic justice”. But … they had to discard it when they decided to have The Man off screen for the entire movie.

• Some scenes of forest creatures and the forest fire are unused footage from Pinocchio.

• There are only roughly 1,000 words of dialogue throughout the entire film, the rest is silence. Bambi doesn’t speak until 13 minutes into the film.

• When Bambi battles Ronno, it’s easy to tell who is winning, just by looking at the colors in the background. Walt Disney himself explained it: when Ronno wins the colors are green, blue and black. When Bambi triumphs, the colors are yellow, orange and even pink.

• Donnie Dunagan, who was the voice of young Bambi, was also the model for Bambi’s facial expressions.

• And Paula Winslowe, who voiced Bambi’s mother, married John Sutherland, who voiced Bambi as an adult.