The Original Bambi
When reading The Original Bambi: A Story of Life in the Forest, I noticed that the premise of the Disney movie I watched not so many years ago still holds onto the main story of Bambi, just not the main point of Bambi. I touched on the main point of Bambi in my last Blog posting.
Focusing on the story I noticed that there were three key symbols that I could relate into the story through characters. The first being the hunting dogs, who symbolized the Nazi Party in my opinion. In class we touched on how they were the bridge from humans to nature (the animals), however I like to stick with the main theme of the book which is the struggles of antisemitism. The reason I believe this is the dogs hunted down Bambi and the other animals, if it wasn’t for the hunting dogs (Nazi Party) it would be significantly easier for the animals (Jewish People) to survive.
The next character is The Prince. In class we discussed his true purpose which was to help Bambi succeed in life and learn to survive on his own. Thus he states how you should forever be alone, if you want to survive. This character as we learn later in the book is his dad, but before that was revealed it was easy to see that the Prince was Bambi’s father figure, guiding him through the forest and how to stay safe.
We also learn of Gobo and Faline/ Gobo was the deer that grew up in captivity, believing that the hunters loved him as one their own instead of raising him to get healthier so they can have a fair hunt. Honestly Gobo’s story was the saddest because you can make the relation of Gobo being the innocent Jewish children (or Jewish people in general) who had no idea that getting on those trains would be the last thing they did. They believed that the Nazis were helping them, not hurting them. Faline was the love interest for Bambi, in the movie Disney rewrote it to show how Bambi and Faline fall in love and have children, however in the book it states from the wise words of the Prince that Bambi must stay alone forever if he wants to survive, which he does. In the end Bambi listens to the Prince and leaves Faline, living alone, forever.