On Introductions & Bambi

Dear Reader,

Mr. C.S. Schlottman is a madman. Allowing yours truly free reign of your very own film and culture blog is tantamount to playing russian roulette with a national election. Nonetheless its happened and I suppose its at least time I posted something. Los Angeles produces around 4,000 films a year in U.S. alone. While this is astonishing, far more films are cranked out every year in growing markets like India and China.

With the ever-expanding number of titles, one would think that film quality would improve too. This is not the case. Moana was not Up. SO - for my elementary post I should like to tackle something from the past. A film, which perhaps is out of the popular focus, or beyond the purview of the twittersphere. It involves a little deer, You have three guesses, and the first two don't count. So, without further fanfare here we go:

Why I Hate Bambi.

To the average self-proclaimed sophist, Bambi is awful. At face value, Walt Disney’s carton character is disproportion leggy, overly delicate, and possesses as uncomplicated temperament which has not been seen in American children since Hiroshima went up in a cloud of atomic smoke. He is annoyingly perfect. Over the course of the film, we see Bambi run about with his mother, make childhood friends, and blithely frolic with garish butterflies.

The film's anthropomorphic woodland creatures, get along splendidly without any sort of Darwinian repercussion. To the thinking mind, this is banal and so far from the realm of reality that NBC’s Friends seems almost believable. 

Disney's tone shifts with death of Bambi's Mother. She is in fact shot by some shaded huntsmen. Added, Bambi's father fades into the taggia with the same taciturnity as with which he entered. The nascent deer is alone in the world. With nothing.

Now Bambi’s mother does get shot, and his father does appears to abandon him, but the overall concept is absurd. The film’s evil hunters seem to eco the forces of evil that constantly surround us, but any realism or artistic significance is lost in Bambi’s father’s reduced and uncomplicated analysis of human kind’s threat.

An apparent condition of millennial mind is that we refuse to release certain aspects of childhood. Adults can (and do) buy footie pajamas. Social media celebrates the fake, and trivializes the sacred. Not to long ago, a young person graduated high school, found a job, and moved on. It seems that the distinction between childhood and independence have blurred together into a sort of malaise of 21st century adulthood.   

Perhaps we should watch Bambi. Perhaps we should really watch it. In Disney’s film, the young fawn’s character is unspoiled and innocent. Yet Bambi undergoes a significant, and remarkable transformation. He grows up. He fights for the right to claim his childhood love, he leads his fellow forest animals to safety following forest fire. 

As Bambi grows he does not become jaded by the hardships he experiences, but rather assumes his role as Prince of the Forest, and embraces the life he has grown into, not the life he had. Acorns are not intended to remain shrubs, nor are fawns destined to remain fragile. 

It is the same with humans. We can become more than we are now.

Ultimately Bambi has a happy ending. Although his mother is dead, and his forest home destroyed, Bambi comes into his own. Bambi grows up. So perhaps this is why I dislike Bambi. He so gracefully moves past the safety of childhood, while I face my another birthday with the grim realization that I have not yet achieved what I thought I could have. 

Perhaps this is why I hate Bambi.