<
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/21/gunned-down-burned-nazis-bambi-walt-disney-holocaust-allegory>
"When
Love Island stars Molly-Mae Hague and Tommy Fury announced that they
had named their daughter Bambi earlier this year, it caused a bit of a storm.
Some approving fans claimed to be “obsessed” with the name, but
Atomic Kitten
star Kerry Katona called it “ridiculous” (although she later apologised).
Meanwhile, writer Jason Okundaye poked fun with the tweet: “Does Molly-Mae not
know what happened to Bambi’s mum?” Yet, among the many arguments for and
against, nobody mentioned the reason why such a name might actually be quite
timely.
The iconic fawn is this year celebrating a very significant birthday, it being
a century since the German imprint Ullstein Verlag first published
Bambi: A
Life in the Woods. Written by Felix Salten, an Austro-Hungarian, the
coming-of-age novel would go on to be banned by the Nazis before eventually
winding up in the hands of Walt Disney and becoming the animated children’s
film many know and love.
While Salten’s Bambi was far from the cutesy romantic hero of the Disney film,
both versions see the eponymous fawn learning about the natural world, losing
his (yes,
his) mother after she is shot by a hunter, then growing into an
adult. Faline – Bambi’s love interest and also, in the book, his cousin –
appears in both, but she and Bambi are estranged by the end of the original,
not living as a happy family as Disney has it.
Perhaps the most crucial difference between Salten’s novel and Disney’s film,
however, is that the former was aimed at adults.
Bambi: A Life in the Woods
initially appeared in 1922, as a serialisation in the Viennese newspaper
Neue
Freie Presse, before being published as a book the following year. But Disney
was not the first to market the deer’s plight as a children’s story: the 1939
English-language translation of
Bambi’s Children, Salten’s sequel, toned down
the violence and gore, to be more child-friendly. Salten was affronted, writing
to his US publisher: “I beg you most urgently, quite apart from softenings,
not to advertise my work as a children’s book or to launch it otherwise in
such a way.”
While the threat of being hunted is a memorable feature of the film – leading
Stephen King to call it the first horror movie he ever saw – this danger looms
much larger in Salten’s work. Bambi’s mother and his cousin Gobo (replaced by
Thumper the rabbit in the film) are both slain, while Bambi is shot too, only
to be saved by the stag implied to be his father. But this stag then dies,
leaving Bambi not surrounded by a happy family, as in Disney’s version, but
completely alone."
Via Muse, who wrote "Okay, now I want to read the original
Bambi."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
