What You Can Do Without a Computer

If this looks familiar, it’s because I posted it previously. Something weird happened when I posted it and it ended up hidden in the piles of other Bambi reviews. I decided to delete it and post again in the hopes that it would get a fair shake this time.

We watched Bambi again last night because we had just sat through the commentary on The Lion King and were a little confused. All through the commentary they kept talking about how they couldn’t have done the effects without a computer. The fire would have been impossible and they never could have done the stampede. It seemed to us that there was a pretty impressive fire scene in Bambi, well before computers and the rain scene (remember "Drip drip drop little April shower?") was entirely animated by hand. Given, raindrops are far simpler than wildebeests, but the principle is the same and modern Disney is working with 3 times the animators.

The story, if you happen to have somehow missed it, centers around a fawn named Bambi who is the son of the Prince of Deer. The film begins with his birth follows him through his initial lessons with mother and meeting his 2 best friends, Thumper, a rabbit, and Flower, a skunk and his first meeting with Faline, the love interest. The story follows pretty logically through the young life of a deer complete with hunters and a forest fire.

The plot is very logical and has no loose ends. While it doesn’t seem particularly shocking to modern audiences, when it was first shown in the 40’s children were so frightened by the scene where Bambi’s mother is shot that they had to replace the theater seats every 2 or 3 days because the kids were wetting themselves. I doubt Walt was entirely happy that he was causing his audience such extreme fear, but it also had to be a little rewarding to have gotten that much reaction. It is a pretty gripping story and probably encouraged generations of environmentalists and animal rights activists. Armed Forces Network is showing clips of Bambi in their Take Care Of the Environment ad that they have been running lately.

The star of the show is the art. This movie was made while Walt was still alive. He hired the best artists and gave them room to work. The man who did the chipmunks actually made a pet of a chipmunk and had it living in his drawing desk until somebody caught on and he had to get rid of it. I own one page of his life studies of his chipmunk. We can be pretty sure that the other animators didn’t keep live animals at their desks. I mean, imagine having a deer hanging around your desk without anyone noticing. Still, watching this movie is often like watching a nature documentary. The mannerisms of the animals are perfectly in line with what the animals do. The way the deer’s ears flicker back and forth and the rabbits’ noses. Disney is well known to bring animals into the studio, but keeping a chipmunk in your desk goes above and beyond in my opinion. It certainly helps to make a better movie.

The background art is simply stunning. You won’t see better landscape paintings outside a museum. In fact, the way museums are any more, you probably won’t see landscape paintings that good inside a museum. They aren’t photo-real. They’re a little more impressionistic, but that somehow makes them more real. Sometimes you can even see the canvas the paintings were painted on and a white outline was used on some of the trees to make them pop out. There’s a scene at the beginning of The Lion King where we are looking at a distance shot and the camera racks, or changes focus from the foreground to the background. The directors in the commentary went on at length about how they couldn’t have done it without a computer. Maybe, they couldn’t have done it without a computer, but Walt did it in Bambi with his very own invention, the multi-plane camera.

When you see one of the old Disney movies back to back with one of the new ones you really do realize that none of the new guys could hold a candle to the old guys. Keep in mind, however, that the old guys were supervised by Walt who wanted the best, no matter how long it took and the new guys were being supervised by Eisner who wanted to make the Summer movie schedule no matter what it took. Of course all the new guys have been laid off, the animation desks were even auctioned off on eBay a couple of years ago. Now all movies are being made on computers. I guess the directors were successful in convincing everyone that they "couldn’t have done it without computers." Sadly that means we won’t be getting anymore Bambis. Or Lion Kings.