DVD Review HTF REVIEW: Bambi - Absolutely Recommended!!! (1 Viewer)

[DaViD Boulet]

That's the way I try to personally evaluate "art" myself...what did the artist *intend* to do?

Whether I like the color blue or not is irrelevant...if the artist did a good job making blue, and that was their goal...then they succeeded. Whether I "like" it may be another matter...but I wouldn't say it was "bad".

That's the way I felt about Pulp Fiction. Great movie...did just what the director wanted it to do...happens to be a movie I don't personally like because I don't like visceral, graphic violence.

 

[george kaplan]

I don't know, I think there's plenty of "story" here. I'm one who does get bored when films don't have good plots, but Bambi never bored me, nor did it bore my 4 year old son, who watched it again the next day.

 

[Nathan Phillips]

I think the story thrust in "Bambi" is just fine, but I can understand the point about it being unnecessarily (but only slightly) didactic. I have the same problem with "The Iron Giant," but I still love both movies and I understand the reasons for the brief moralizing. Even "Watership Down," my all-time favorite animated feature, doesn't escape that tone completely.

I bought the DVD without planning to when I went to Best Buy to grab "Bringing Up Baby." I hadn't seen "Bambi" since I was 4, during the '88 theatrical rerelease. I bought it mostly because I have just spent far too much money catching up on the OOP "Sleeping Beauty" and "Snow White" discs (not to mention the Toy Story box and a Walt Disney Treasures title a few months ago) and would prefer to repeat that procedure as little as possible.

In essence, I felt the same way as many others here. I was stunned by the movie and the more I think about it, the more I love it. I must admit to expecting that it would be far more maudlin and sticky, because my memories were probably colored by mediocre pap like "Land Before Time" and (gulp) "The Lion King." I loved the staging, the character animation, the backgrounds, the sparse dialogue, the voice acting, and particularly the score, which is instantly one of my four or five favorite film scores.

Hope I'm not going on too much, but the two scenes that really got me were "April Showers," which reminded me of the most heavenly bits and pieces of the Silly Symphonies, and the death of the mother... so perfectly understated; they'd never take that kind of a risk now. On the whole I felt more justified in my feeling that the first five Disney features are almost infinitely superior to the rest. That may be an exaggeration because I do love "Alice in Wonderland," "Sleeping Beauty," "The Jungle Book," and "Beauty and the Beast," but even those don't have the kind of dimension of this, "Pinocchio," and the other initial attempts. I don't know if I'm alone in that feeling or not, but it certainly has grown stronger lately.

Anyway, I'm thrilled that this has sold so well and I hope it teaches the bigwigs something about the appeal of hand-drawn animation and the complete uselessness of attempting to create the cheapquels (but it will probably have the opposite effect in the latter case -- sigh).

 

[Paul_Scott]

opened this up and watched a little bit last night



thats exactly what i thought as i watched it.
one of those times i had to scrape my jaw off the floor.
for a few minutes i got hung up looking for grain (i consider myself a purist as well, more often than not), but it got to a point where i felt i was losing sight of the forest for the trees (npi).
this is not an excellant representation of the film, in fact you could say its a poor representation of the film.
on the other hand, its a stunning representation of the artwork/craft that was first delivered on a film medium .
and i have absoltuely, 100%, no problem with that.

i haven't been particularly impressed with Disney dvds in general. whether its aspect ratio compromises for the live action stuff, or the use of EE or less than optimal compression, etc- they just strike me as mediocre as a dvd studio.

Bambi, however, looks to be a remarkable achievment.
and there is a philosophy behind the (resotration for video) that i find very interesting in concept, and superb in execution.

also Kudos for the audio mixing.
not bombastic or gimmicky, but subtle and discrete.
a huge display of class in their restraint.
perfect!

very well done, Disney!

 

[Joel...Lane]

I got Bambi for my birthday. My wife knows what an OAR nut I am but to her that just means "widescreen." So she told me that when she bought it she asked whoever was working there, "Now, this is in widescreen right?" The employee said "No, this movie doesn't come in widescreen." She said "Are you sure?" He said yes. When I opened it, she said to me, "You know this movie's not in widescreen." I just smiled and said I know.

 

[Ernest Rister]

On the whole I felt more justified in my feeling that the first five Disney features are almost infinitely superior to the rest. That may be an exaggeration because I do love "Alice in Wonderland," "Sleeping Beauty," "The Jungle Book," and "Beauty and the Beast," but even those don't have the kind of dimension of this, "Pinocchio," and the other initial attempts. I don't know if I'm alone in that feeling or not, but it certainly has grown stronger lately.

You're not alone. Richard Schickel, John Culhane, John Canemaker, Leonard Maltin -- lowly turnips like me -- and the Disney animators themselves all share the same general opinion, that the height of the Disney animated feature as an art form was 1937 - 1942. Consensus of opinion doesn't really mean anything to an individual, who is free to appreciate whatever he or she wants to (somewhere out there exists a person who thinks Brother Bear is Disney's best film). But for what it's worth, I certainly agree with you.

 

[george kaplan]

But do you think there's anyone who thinks Oliver & Company is the best?

 

[Ernest Rister]

I'm sure there is. Heck, Roger Ebert gave that turkey three stars.

 

[Laura Nicholson]

Nathan, have you read the book? It's even better than the movie. I try to recommend "Watership Down" to everyone.

Ernest, you had mentioned in an earlier post that you owned the soundtrack for "Bambi". Which soundtrack would you recommend? I didn't remember the music being as good as it was.

 

[DaveF]

For a film like Bambi, how do we know the intent by which to judge? Maybe it was easily found, but I didn't know the actual intent of Bambi until Walt's original working-group notes were pulled from the archives and dramatized in a DVD special feature ("animals struggling in the forest. this is the story.").

I'm amazed that Bambi was made in the 1930s. The quality of artwork, animation, and scoring are remarkable. And as an engineer, I was impressed by the multi-plane camera design. Very cool.

One final question: In the documentary videos, I was surprised to see the cels and glass plates handled by ungloved hands grasping the face. That would leave fingerprints, which I'd expect to be visible to the camera. Was that normal procedure?

 

[Jay Pennington]

Probably not. That footage was staged for the "Tricks of the Trade" TV episode some 15 years after Bambi was produced, so the behavior shouldn't be taken as gospel.

 

[rich_d]

I finally worked through the special features. Backstage Disney with the different components of Bambi was pretty good.

Was anyone else bothered by Andreas Deja's comments? Naturally I prefer to hear from those actually involved in Bambi as opposed to second or third hand accounts but Deja (who is Supervising Animator for Disney's current animation features) says stuff like "I remember Frank Thomas did the scene where Bambi chases the butterfly." And he looks off in the distance and narrows his eyes like if he were trying to clear the cobwebs of his memory of 1942. No Andreas, you don't remember Frank doing anything, you remember hearing about what Frank did. Kinda creepy.

 

[TheLongshot]

What you don't know is that they put Frank Thomas's brain in Deja's head.

Jason

 

[Jay Pennington]

...from Frank.

 

[Cees Alons]

His full name is Andreas Deja Vue.


Cees

 

[Patrick McCart]

I just finished watching this for the first time...

Wow. The animation is stunning. What really stands out to me is the "slower" timing of the animation. Attention to the tiny slower movements. Also, the detail on shadows and lighting is superb. Beautiful!

As for the DVD, I can't believe how great they made the film look. Lowry Digital Images really has a talent for working on animation, without messing up the artwork. I'm glad Disney went for a "pure" master without applying a bunch of extra filtering like they did on Mary Poppins and most of their other DVD's. The audio is incredible... I'm guessing Disney all the original elements for the audio, unlike Snow White (which required hundreds of interpolations) and Fantasia. The 5.1 remix was excellent, without sounding weird.

It's neat that they added some restoration credits at the end, too. LDI rarely gets credit for their work.

 

[Ernest Rister]

I've owned multiple versions of the Bambi soundtrack, going all the way back to vinyl in the 70's. The best "music-only" version is producer Randy Thornton's restored version of the soundtrack on CD, Walt Disney Records catalog # 60880-7, Walt Disney's Bambi: An Original Walt Disney Pictures Soundtrack. I'm unaware of any newer CD of the score available. There is an isolated music and f/x only track on the 1997 55th anniversary laserdisc, which is in mono, but at least it is the complete score (the CD does not have the Dog Hunt cue).

 

[MatthewLouwrens]

I DO!!
(Cowers under Ernest's withering scorn) OK, I don't.
I've never seen it. And from its reputation, I'm glad about that.

 

[Jay Pennington]

Digging back a bit for a roundup of some points I've been meaning to respond to...


Yeah. But ya gotta feel for Andreas, and if a cheapquel HAS to be done (which, of course, it doesn't), then it looks like he and his collaborators are making the best of it. At least the guy got to work in 2D a bit longer. It does seem to be animated well. Strange bobblehead redesign of young Bambi, though.

It was nice having his insight for the archives visit in the extras, too.

Just got around to watching the "story meeting" feature. I knew it would be interesting, but expected it to be a simple alternate audio track. What a pleasant surprise to see visual depictions of several of the speakers, comparisons to storyboards and surviving backgrounds and pencil tests, and clips from shorts relevant to the discussion. Very good impression of Walt, too. Not just the voice, but the manner of speaking.

I had to chuckle:

(paraphrased)

"We should let Marc do the skunk, he did such a good job on the story sketches"

WALT: "Mark who?"

"Davis"

"Oh, he's over here now?"

A man destined to become one of the Nine Old Men and Walt didn't even know he'd been on the payroll since 1935.

(Or was "over here" in reference to the 1940 move from Hyperion to Burbank? Was that a gradual transition or overnight?)


As for the film itself I really only have one criticism: the rapid gear shift to happy, singing birds right after the death of Bambi's mother. Even seeing it for the first time at the age of eight, I felt manipulated: the deliberate "okay, the little ones are bawling, better lighten things up fast" attempt of the creators was obvious. In the audio commentary for the new Iron Giant disc, Brad Bird said as a kid he was mad at the birds for being happy. I was mad at the filmmakers. A brief scene of mourning/life goes on would've been helpful to gear up for twitterpation, I feel. Maybe just a brief montage of Spring taking over from Winter might've done it.

Extremely minor observation, of interest to animation buffs only: The slow zoom to a held cel of Thumper's face when he's transfixed by the, um, rabbit vamp, is shot on twos, and is thus choppy. I understand the reasons to animate on twos for much of the time, but camerawork on unchanging artwork?

But wow, I was really appreciating the character animation more than ever this time around. Frank Thomas' work on Thumper is unequalled. All the little touches: when Thumper is encouraging Bambi onto the ice and says, "aw, it's all right", he makes playful leap, rotating over 180 degrees in midair and coasting the rest of the way around once back on the ice. A lesser animator would've just have him make a waving motion for such a quick line. But the leap is so...Thumper.

Did Frank do the introduction of Young Adult Thumper? He has different body language during his thumping.

 

[TedD]

The fact that you are seeing this on both SW and Bambi, tells me that your black levels are not properly calibrated (i.e. set too high).

A properly calibrated display will not show this effect on either title. I can certainly mis-calibrate my setup to show the matte issues on SW, but at proper black levels they are not visible.

Ted

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