More on the Book
To begin, I never knew the origin of the movie Bambi what-so-ever, so to me it was very interesting to see the background of it all in the books introduction. To explain, the author of the book’s name was Siegmund Salzmann and he later changed his name to Felix Salten. He did this to try and make his name sound less Jewish because of the antisemitism during the time. Salten wrote the book in German, and it was later translated into English. The first translation to English was written in 1928 by American writer Whittaker Chambers. As an interesting side note, Chambers was later found to be a communist spy. The first translation was the first place that the original message from Salten got twisted in a way that Salten did not portray. Chambers, when translating this story, did not have a profound knowledge of Austrian German, which led to many errors in his translation of basic things like German idioms. Chambers did not portray the dilemma Salten portrayed, which makes the story lose the good tone from the author that it originally had. Salten when writing Bambi, had a certain perspective that life is like a very unfair game that is controlled by others that are “higher up.” He portrays the story of Bambi by showing that the animals have an unfair life because of the humans that are constantly hunting and “changing the rules” of the game that life is. The idea that animals have a peaceful lifestyle is false, and the humans have completely disrupted the animals normal way of life. The characters in the book, like the different insects and animals, had a much more negative aura about them. They are not very nice, and they don’t want to talk to Bambi which is interesting to see because of the difference in the movie. Despite many differences, I was surprised at the fact that there were some very close similarities between the book and the movie which I did not expect to see.
More on the Movie
In the movie Bambi by Disney, the storyline is much different. In the movie the storyline is much more peaceful and had somewhat of a different meaning than the book. It went away from Salten’s idea of unfair life, and more gave a picture of life for an animal. The movie was also much more innocent than the book. The book had vivid descriptions of animals fighting and animals getting killed where in the movie it is much less descriptive and in a way skips over the uglier parts of animal lives. One bigger difference I noticed was that in the movie Bambi was made out to be almost like a celebrity that everyone wanted to meet because he was “the prince,” but in the book very few creatures were interested in him, and the interest did not last long. The creatures in the movie were obsessed with him, and the facts that he was the prince when he was a newborn was brought up many times. In the more sad parts of the movie where the mother of Bambi dies, the movie brushes over that event, and then shows Bambi falling in love afterwards and making a family. This is not the same in the book because the book gives a perspective that Bambi just kind of moves on and lives his life. Disney definitely glorified the ideas of love and added that in for more of a storyline. The physical description of the meadow between the movie and book were pretty similar, and they both gave off a more tense and scary feeling. I think the movie made the meadow seem slightly less scary, and more like a lesson to kids watching the movie. Disney definitely gave it a feeling of listen to your parents and what they tell you and you’ll be alright, whereas the book made the meadow feel like no mans land in a sense.