When I took my course on Ecocritical Approaches to Filmmaking at university, the texts we read on animation often focused on critiquing the films of Disney. Bambi (1942) was repeatedly one of the films that was met with heavy criticism due to its idealized portrayal of nature. For one of my readings that focused on Bambi, I noticed that the artistry that went into the film was simply glossed over.
Although I recognize that academic texts such as these must have a focus and that this focus was on the portrayal of nature, I find it sad that academia in general does not seem to refer to animation with the awe of the medium that I believe is due.
So, in this post, I want to elaborate a bit on the pre-production work that animators undertook for Bambi and share some deer studies from the film—as a type of tribute to the amazing artistry of the animation.
In the reading I mention above, the author explains how the animators took life-drawing courses on fawns to understand their anatomy and mannerisms. As he writes, Walt Disney wanted the animals in Bambi to be as realistic as possible (while still fitting into the “appeal” aspect of the animation medium. For more information on appeal, please see this post by storyartist Mark Kennedy).
When we compare drawings of deer from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, made just a few years earlier, with drawings from Bambi, we can see what a huge difference these classes made in making the deer more believable and anatomically correct.
The legendary animator Andreas Deja, the supervising animator on characters such as Gaston, Scar and Hercules, has a blog, Deja View, where he posts various drawings he inherited from some of Disney’s Nine Old Men (a series of animators known for their incredible skill and who were the ones to discover the principles of animation during Disney’s Golden Age).
He has done a few blog posts in which he shares some of these drawings, as well as photos from the life-drawing sessions during the making of Bambi. You can find these posts here and here.
I have shared some of these drawings below:
When academia refers to Bambi, it’s important not to overlook the incredible skill and hard work that went into the film. At the time of its making, animation was still a new and unexplored medium. The filmmakers had no way of knowing whether animation could sustain the level of realism Walt sought. Yet the animators took on the challenge and created Bambi -- a film with realistically drawn deer as had never been seen before (and perhaps not since). From an animation perspective, Bambi is a masterful showcase of artistry.
Animator Milt Kahl's pencil test of Bambi