Walt Disney’s fifth animated feature film is the one that has scarred multiple generations of impressionable viewers with its off-camera but no less devastating killing of the eponymous young deer, the first time that a character had died in a Disney film. The film tends to be remembered more for that one scene (and some odd sexually suggestive moments) than for its admittedly thin storyline but it’s still a remarkable, important and stunning piece of work, the last of Disney’s first era of classic animated films.

Its idyllic opening, with a glorious, multiplaned forest and pastoral music that leads into some cutesy business with young animals at play, hardly hints at the trauma to come. A never-named doe (voiced by Paula Winslowe) gives birth to a fawn named Bambi, destined to take over his father’s place as Great Prince of the Forest (Fred Shields). Bambi (Donnie Dunagan, from Son of Frankenstein (1939)) is befriended by a young rabbit named Thumper (Peter Behn), a young skunk named Flower (Stan Alexander) and a female fawn named Faline (Cammie King). But the fawn’s life is changed forever when hunters descend on the meadow near their forest home and his mother is killed. The Great Prince leads Bambi home and a year later, now a young stag, Bambi (Hardie Albright) returns to his friends. The wise Friend Owl (Will Wright) warns them of “twitterpation” and the onset of interest in the opposite sex and sure enough, Thumper (now voiced by Tim Davis) and Flower (Tim Davis) have soon found their mates. Bambi falls for Faline (Ann Gillis) who has now grown into a beautiful doe. But their relationship will have to wait – Man has returned to the forest and the animals are scattered in panic as flames destroy their woodland home and Bambi struggles to find Faline and lead the other animals to safety.

Bambi was based on a 1923 book by Austrian writer Felix Salten, Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde/Bambi, a Life in the Woods. MGM had planed a live-action version as early as 1933 but when producer Sidney Franklin realised that it was far too technically challenging an undertaking, he sold the rights to Disney in 1937. The production of Disney’s version was a long, drawn out affair – Disney had his team of writers and animators start work on an ad potation as soon as he secured the rights but as Fantasia (1940) got in the way, production stalled and only picked up again in August 1939. It still took another three years to bring the story to the screen.

The ongoing effects of the Second World War and the fallout from the animators’ strike of 1941, which led to the exodus of many of the early talents at Disney, saw the studio scale back its ambitions for he rest of the 1940s. There were still plenty of animated releases to come but they tended to be smaller, less fondly remembered films like Saludos Amigos (1943), Make Mine Music (1946) and Melody Time (1948) until 1950 when the bounced back with Cinderella.

Bambi marked another leap forward in animation excellence. The detail in the animal designs is breath-taking and their movements are as realistic as anthropomorphised animated animals were ever going to get. The climactic ravaging of the forest by the hunters features some of Disney’s finest animation so far.

And then of course, there’s that moment… Rarely has an off-camera death been so affecting. The killing of Bambi’s unnamed mother will have resonated with younger viewers (Disney’s daughter Diane among them – she was horrified by the killing) who were probably being confronted for the very first time with the horrible realisation that mums aren’t around forever. His father’s words, “your mother can’t be with you any more…” will have horrified young and impressionable minds but in a film about the circle of life (The Lion King (1994) owes a very real debt to Bambi), death is inevitable and in Bambi, many children were forced to deal with it – albeit at a distance – for the first time.

For all the frolicking animals of the opening scenes, Bambi is a remarkably sombre film. There are very few songs – the only one of any note is the lovely Little April Showers – and the climax is no less affecting that the adult deer’s off-screen demise, the hellish firestorm that engulfs the forest as scary as anything Disney had depicted so far. “Man” is back in the forest again, unleashing the hounds and setting the trees aflame. After the death of Bambi’s mother, all bets were off and there was no guarantee that anyone was going to make it out of the conflagration alive.

Only the destructive effects of Man’s incursions into the forest are seen, the actual humans causing it are kept off-screen or as little more than shadowy presences. Nothing is ever seen from the point of view pf man who remains an off-camera monster – “Man” placed at number 20 in the villains list in the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Heroes & Villains (2003). In that same film, the despicable behaviour of the unseen human characters, particularly the killing of Bambi’s mother was cited by Paul McCartney of The Beatles as one of the factors that inspired his lifelong commitment to animal rights.

Less salubrious are the scenes in which the young male animals meet their mates for the first time, a scene which contains one of the earliest instances of the sexual innuendo that was to pop up from time to time in their later films. Flower the skunk becomes notably stiff and red when he’s kissed for the first time and Thumper becomes similarly over-excited on his first physical contact with the opposite sex. It’s the sort of thing that would become a commonplace in later Warner Bros. cartoons (thing the wolf in Red Hot Riding Hood (1943)) and maybe it’s reading too much into an innocent joke but it’s difficult not to take the scene at face value. Did anyone really notice in 1942 or is this just something that’s been noticed in less innocent, more cynical times?

The film was only a minor hit when it was released. American audiences were still reeling from their recent entry into the Second World War and European markets were largely out-of-bounds because of the conflict. It was still turned a decent profit for Disney under the circumstances but, as with so many of their early 40s films, it was the re-issues – beginning in 1947 – that really cemented it as a perennial favourite. In 2006, Bambi joined the list of Disney classics that got a direct-to-video follow-up in the shape of Bambi II. As these unnecessary and unwanted sequels went, it was one of the better ones. Less welcome was the news in 2019 that Bambi was joining that other list, the Disney animated films getting a live-action or, in this case, computer generated remake. One shouldn’t prejudge, but one suspects that it won’t have the lasting appeal of the original.