This was a really cute movie but actually watching it I do wonder what the point was.

In Bambi we follow a little fawn named Bambi who goes through what I can tell is probably the first year of his life, and throughout this year we see highs and lows and in the end it ends up with him being the father of twins, which is lovely, but just seemed a bit odd to me that nothing really happened. It just seemed to be a little snippet into his life and then his life would just continue onwards past the movie and so for me I didn’t really see much point in it.

What I find interesting is, I remember reading a while ago that they didn’t want to show hunters in a bad light, and so they were going to show Bambi‘s mum actually dead but they decided against it because it would make the shooters look bad. But actually watching the movie they looked bad anyway so I don’t really get what the argument was.

Let’s talk about the human side of it for a moment. This movie shows off nature in a beautiful way and shows just how cute and cuddly all these animals are and then shows the humans in quite a bad light because they’re out here shooting them and killing them and of course if we’re going to be emotionally invested in Bambi we’re going to be invested in his family as well. So when his mum is shot it’s a very sad moment and once again at the end with the dogs and the fire, humans just come off so bad in this movie.

So what’s something we can take away from it? Well for me it shows me to be more accepting of animals and to be nicer and more caring towards animals. Humans seem to be the ones that cause the destruction to all this wildlife and if we didn’t go out of our way to hunt them down for sport and traumatise them and then set fire, even if it is accidentally, to their homes the ecosystem would be much better.

Now I know culling’s and things like that have to happen to keep everything in order but in this movie it didn’t seem to be that. It did seem to be a group of people who wanted to go out and hunt animals and take trophies home, which I don’t agree with anyway, so it was interesting for Disney to put out a movie like this because it does show humans in such a bad light and I do wonder how people responded to it at the time too. I feel that back in the 1940s climate change wasn’t such a big topic and so to talk about this sort of thing in terms of animal welfare and cruelty to animals and forest fires etc. is all rather interesting.

Would I watch this movie again? Probably. It was a good movie I just felt there wasn’t really much point to it and in some ways I wish more happened, but I guess that was the way things were back then, it was a cute story with a lovely cast of animals and I love deer anyway so it was nice to watch but it just didn’t excite me too much. Maybe I am numb from Dumbo but Bambi‘s mother’s death didn’t hit me quite as hard as I thought it would either.

What do you think?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding