Bambi - Production

Production

Sidney Franklin, a producer and director at MGM films, purchased the film rights to Felix Salten's novel Bambi, A Life in the Woods in 1933, intending to adapt it as a live-action film. Deciding it would be too difficult to make such a film, he sold the film rights to Walt Disney in April 1937. Disney began work on crafting an animated adaptation immediately, intending it to be the company's second feature-length animated film and their first to be based on a specific, recent work. The original novel was written for an adult audience, however, and was considered too "grim" and "somber" for a regular light-hearted Disney film. The artists also discovered that it would be challenging to animate deer realistically, and at the same time keep the characters slightly exaggerated and "cartoony". These difficulties resulted in Disney putting production on hold while the studio worked on several other projects. In 1938, Disney assigned Perce Pearce and Carl Fallberg to work on the film's storyboards, but attention was soon drawn away as the studio began working on Fantasia (1940). Finally, on August 17, 1939, production on Bambi began in earnest, though progressed slowly owing to changes in the studio personnel, location, and methodology of handling animation at the time.

There were many interpretations of the story. Characters such as Mr. Hare (Thumper's Father) and a comic duo of a Squirrel and a Chipmunk were created but eventually cut from the film. There was a scene involving two autumn leaves conversing and eventually dying by falling to the ground, but the artist found that talking flora didn't work in the context of the film and instead used a visual metaphor of two realistic leaves falling to the ground. There was a scene of Bambi stepping on an ant's nest and showing all the devastation that he caused, but it was cut for pacing reasons. In the scene in which Bambi's mother dies there was a brief scene showing her getting shot, but the story team decided the scene was too sad, and that it was emotional enough to justify having her death occur off screen. Disney wanted to show man being killed in the fire to prove to Bambi that man was not invincible. However, the scene was cut for unknown reasons. The writing was completed in July 1940, by which time the film's budget had swelled to $858,000.

Walt Disney attempted to achieve realistic detail in this animated film. He had Rico LeBrun, a painter of animals, come and lecture to the animators on the structure and movement of animals. Animators also visited the Los Angeles Zoo. A pair of fawns (named Bambi and Faline) were shipped from the area of present-day Baxter State Park in Maine to the studio so that the artists could see first-hand the movement of these animals. The source of these fawns, from the Eastern United States, was the impetus for the transformation of Felix Salten's roe deer to white-tailed deer. A small zoo was also established at the studio so animators could study other animals, like rabbits, ducks, owls, and skunks, at close range. The animators learned a lot about animals during the film's production that they would utilize in future projects. Animators now had a broader spectrum of animation styles, from the wider stylization of Mickey Mouse to the naturalistic look and realistic movement of the characters in Bambi.

The background of the film was inspired by the Eastern American woodlands. One of the earliest and best-known artists for the Disney studio, Maurice "Jake" Day, spent several weeks in the Vermont and Maine forests, sketching and photographing deer, fawns, and the surrounding wilderness areas. However his first sketches were too 'busy' as the eye did not know where to focus. Tyrus Wong, a Chinese animator, showed Day some of his impressionistic paintings of a forest. Day liked the paintings and appointed him art director of the film. Wong's backgrounds were revolutionary since they had more detail around the center and less around the edges. This technique made the audience focus on the characters.

Although there were no humans in Bambi, live-action footage of humans was used for one scene: actress Jane Randolph and Ice Capades star Donna Atwood acted as live-action references for the scene where Bambi and Thumper are on the icy pond.

The realism that Disney was pushing caused delays in production; animators were unaccustomed to drawing natural animals, and expert animators could only manage around eight drawings a day. This amounted to only a half-foot of film per day, unlike the normal rate of production of ten feet. This resulted in less than a second of film versus over thirteen seconds. Disney was later forced to slash 12 minutes from the film before final animation to save production costs, in response to losses suffered in Europe.