Word: bambi
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Newcomer Thumper carries most of Bambi's comedy. Just a normal growing bunny, he won't eat his greens, and adds sly innuendoes to the maxims his mother makes him recite. As court jester to Bambi, who is a prince and must maintain a reasonable reserve, he is very funny. His inability to keep his itching foot from vibrating while making love to the beauteous Mrs. Thumper is great slapstick. So is the skating lesson he gives Bambi. "Come on," he coaxes, "the water's stiff...
Edward Plumb's background music is expertly keyed into the production, but none of Bambi's four songs (best: Let's Sing a Gay Little Spring Song) is notable. Some innovations are. For the first time, Disney has done his backgrounds in oils instead of watercolors. The result is striking. The russet reds, browns, bright yellows, make autumn look like autumn. Each season has a special color impact. The colors are softer, more alive and, with the aid of the multiplane camera, give the picture solidity, the forest a three-dimensional depth...
Fantasia's use of color to suggest moods and emotions is repeated in the yellow-white silhouettes of Bambi and his mother fleeing from the hunters in the meadow-symbols of livid fear. When Bambi fights another buck for possession of Faline, the spring day darkens to an ominous brownish red, like drying blood. The battling bucks fight in luminous outline against a wine-dark background...
...Bambi is filled with the laughter of children, and their voices speak for the animals. Their genuine laughter was recorded by running off some Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons at the Disney studio for a group of neighborhood children. Thumper's all-boy voice rates an Academy award. It belongs to a youngster named Peter Behn. His dialogue was recorded early in the five years it took to make the $1,600,000 Bambi. Brought back for retakes several years later, Master Behn scarcely got his lines out before his voice changed...
...Bambi has an all-animal cast, but man is present by implication. Disney's indictment of men who kill animals for sport is so effective that U.S. sportsmen who have seen the picture are gunning for him. They feel that Disney is undoing their lifework of conserving wild animals for future open seasons. After Bambi they may have a hard time convincing Disneyacs...