774 Bambi

Bambi is no doubt a classic masterpiece of Walt Disney animation studio. I've only seen Dumbo in my childhood and have never seen Alice in Wonderland or Pinnochio or Sleeping Beauty or Jungle Book, or Fantasia. I assume they are wonderful too. But at start, I would like to appreciate Bambi and its amazing visualization of nature and wild animas, and the combination of them with the outstanding description of fluffiness and loveliness of baby animals. 

I was surprised to find the story was basically a cycle of seasons and baby bambi growing to be the king of the forest with playing with his fellows, meeting his life partner, fighting back other deer or hunting dogs and running away from hunters and forest fires. These events are sometimes happy, and sometimes disastrous. The change of the four seasons are not the background but the part of the story. It's of course an animated fiction but it looks more than that. I cannot help thinking of the series of work of wildlife animals by Ernest Thompson Seton. 

This is partly because the animated drawings of animals and nature are very precise and breathlessly beautiful to the extent it becomes an art work, not just a lovely educational film for kids. Especially the expression of nature from rain, thunder, wind, leaves, river, ice, snow, and fire, to the variety of animal actions like rabbit's wiggling its nose and bambi and his father's running down the hill, or baby Bambi's first walking, eating tree bark, sniffing scent of flowers. The description of the dynamism are real and yet it has poetic brilliance.   

The great and adorable movie is worth watching again and again.