‘In God’s wildness lives the hope of the world … The great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness.’
John Muir, John of the Mountains
There are three nearly universal stories, taking different forms in various cultures, that give shape to our sense of having moved away from the nature that was our origin. Though they have many counterparts elsewhere, the names most commonly given to these stories in the West are Arcadia, Eden and the Golden Age (Eisenberg, 2000). Walt Disney’s Snow White is, as we have seen, essentially the story of Arcadia, decked out in populist modern colours and grafted onto the root stem of the fairy tale. Bambi, released in 1942, was Disney’s next animated feature to deal centrally with wild nature and is essentially the story of Eden. Perhaps less definitively, the nostalgia for an ideal, innocent past that is ingrained within all Disney’s feature films could be seen as congruent with the myth of the Golden Age. Hence Disney feature animation, from its earliest phases, can be seen as related to all three of these major story forms.
Bambi is the story of a deer growing up in the forest, surviving the death of its mother, reaching sexual maturity and siring fauns of its own. It is based on a children’s novel by the Austrian writer Felix Salten, that was first published in English in 1928. Insofar as the narrative structure of the film version is dictated by the life cycle of a particular kind of animal, Bambi could be taken to be a fictionalized form of natural history. Successive episodes focus on key moments in the development of the deer and its growth to maturity. The film opens just after Bambi has been born and charts the deer’s initial wobbly progress towards acquiring physical agility and prowess within its environment. The audience watches the deer as it learns to use the food rich, but dangerous, open space of meadowland prudently. We observe the young deer as it changes its grazing habits through necessity, adapting to the harsh conditions of winter. Later it grows to understand the physical differentiation of the sexes when the male acquires antlers, together with the competitive struggle for females that ensues once bucks have reached sexual maturity. All this is relayed to the viewer within animated frames that strive for new heights of realism; indeed, the degree of realism within Bambi disturbed a number of early viewers of the film, who felt that this had pushed beyond the aesthetic boundaries appropriate for animation. We will return to the issue of what is implied by the mode of representation Disney developed within this film at the end of this chapter.
But Bambi is not just a depiction of the life cycle of the deer, picked out with a degree of realistic detail that is highly unusual within the format of a children’s animated feature. The film is capable of engaging with our feelings powerfully because it is also, at a deeper level, a version of the Eden myth. The forest is conjured with a kind of joyful and lyrical delight appropriate for the representation of unfallen nature within paradise. Marc Eliot describes Bambi as ‘the most visually gracious of all Disney’s classic animated features. The purest evocation yet of Disney’s vision of a perfect world …’ (1995: 177). As in the biblical Eden, nature’s predatory, stinging, biting, aggressive functions are almost wholly absent. The only natural predator represented in the film, the owl, is a kind of grumpy, middle-aged guardian of forest life whose most aggressive act is to hoot at a group of amorous birds who are disturbing his springtime peace. The storyline of the film – changed from Felix Salten’s book – finishes with a kind of expulsion from this forest paradise, as the combination of a large-scale hunting expedition and a fire drive the deer up over the mountains to seek safety. The relative ease with which the animals are able to reclaim their scarred but rejuvenating ‘Eden’ at the end of the film can perhaps be understood as a result of the fallen state of their world being attributable wholly to Man, who drives them out, and not at all to the gentle, innocent forest creatures that nature eventually rescues. Finally Bambi is himself showcased as a gawkily comic pastiche of the biblical Adam, when he struggles, in anthropomorphic vein, to acquire language early in the film and to name the other forest creatures.
The version of the Eden myth that is offered to us within Bambi is also, in the broadest sense (as with Snow White), a kind of pastoral. The opening song of the movie highlights its principal theme as ‘love’ and, as in classical and renaissance forms of pastoral, there are set pieces that play on a repertoire of expressive conventions to elaborate this theme. Perhaps the most striking and (despite its obvious sentimentality) visually successful of these is the sequence in which the trio of young animal friends fall consecutively and hopelessly in love. The sequence is given a framework of ironic distance that helps counteract its more sentimental effusions by the owl’s opening disquisition on the universal process of ‘twitterpating’, a neologism he coins disparagingly to represent the sexual imperatives taking over the minds and feelings of all creatures in spring. But the visual play that is made with conventional gestures of female seductiveness and male emotional susceptibility works also because of the imaginative excess with which the stereotypes are allowed to hold sway. As with Charlie Chaplin’s romantic feature films, it is the comedy that restrains and redirects the fundamentally sentimental impulse here, the potential gap between animal and human, biology and feeling, both collapsed and paradoxically exploited. Joseph Meeker has observed that comedy is more highly attuned to the processes of the natural world than other major forms, such as tragedy, since it so often ‘grows from the biological circumstances of life’ (1972: 23). This is certainly true of the comic patterns that evolve within Bambi, which are based, ultimately, on the drive towards reproduction and the environmental conditions that shape growth to maturity and survival. Meeker, indeed, posits a significant, and generally overlooked, similarity between the ‘organizational principles and processes’ of nature and ‘the patterns found in comedy. Productive and stable ecosystems are those which minimize destructive aggression, encourage maximum diversity, and seek to establish equilibrium among their participants – which is essentially what happens in … comedy’ (ibid.: 27).
Pastoral comedy is not simply a play with conventions whose ultimate purpose is to create a dynamic equilibrium that harmonizes – and emphasizes parallels between – human experience and the processes of the natural world however. It is also a way of seeing. And exactly what Disney’s pastoral take on the Eden myth allows us to see – and not to see – in Bambi is of central significance in terms of the film’s connection with ideas of nature. What we see are natural forms – behaviour and environments closely and (within the limits of the anthropomorphized animated medium) accurately observed. The film’s opening sequence is a long tracking and crabbing shot that seems to circle ever inwards through a misty half light that slowly reveals trees, branches, mosses, stones and river as the camera moves us sensitively into the very intimate heart of the forest. In this intimate and enclosed space we bear witness, alongside the other small animals, to the mystery of life’s origins, the birth of a young faun that is accorded a special reverence and significance by the other forest dwellers. Our viewpoint is that of the small animals and the camera’s slow penetration of successive layers within the forest space (the effect of which is considerably enhanced by adept use of the relatively new multiplane technology) seems to take us into a special realm where we can see what is normally secret and unobserved within the lives of the animals. The whole film, indeed, works up this feeling of enabling an intimacy with the natural world, in modes ordinarily inaccessible to humans, through its selective focus on details of animal behaviour that are, at least partly, grounded in the real world. Thus images of the young faun curled up lovingly within the contours of its mother’s body are complemented by observations of seasonal changes in patterns of feeding: cautious access to the food resources of the meadow in summer; feeding from the bark of trees, when the ground is frozen over in winter; the sensuous pleasure, made keen by prolonged hunger, of tasting the first shoots of new grass in spring. Alongside the conceits, gags and heavily anthropomorphized scenes, children watching Bambi learn about a range of issues affecting animal behaviour. They learn, for instance, that skunks hibernate in the winter whereas other small animals, such as rabbits do not; that male deer grow antlers as they reach maturity and use these in contests of strength with other males as they struggle for the right to mate with female deer; and so on. By the time they have finished watching the film, children with little experience of country life will have been immersed in a plethora of images accessing knowledge of the natural world. Perhaps most striking in this respect is the way the environment of the forest is depicted – the particular forms of trees, the sensitivity to patterns and light, the variety of terrain, even within the forest, from grassland to deciduous woodland mixed with largely coniferous areas, to open spaces, created by a river running through the forest valley, carving out vistas that open onto the cliffs and mountains beyond.
Bambi, in fact, locates the animals within an environment that offers the same kind of visual pleasure as landscape painting and photography. While such a ravishing visual texture might be taken simply as the film’s rhetorical strategy for heightening audiences’ sense of the forest as a natural Eden, I would argue that what we see is also being structured in more specific ways. For the landscape photography lens which defines nature in Bambi shows not just any beautiful environment, but a rather particular one. For a start, even if we did not count the uniformly mainstream, American intonations of the animals’ speech as admissible evidence, the fauna of the forest region, with its skunks, chipmunks and raccoons, is distinctive to the North American sub-continent. This is important because many of the later Disney films featuring wild nature, such as The Jungle Book, Tarzan and The Lion King, focus on more distant and exotic locations and use speech patterns with much more strongly differentiated racial and cultural accents. The forest paradise of Bambi is a linguistically as well as geographically enclosed area, homogeneously grounded within middle-class white America. Even more significantly though, the native fauna and landscape also allow the film to draw on an idea of ‘wilderness’ that is central to North American traditions of thought and feeling. From the writings of early pioneers and settlers, through Thoreau and Emerson to John Muir and Ansell Adams, ‘wilderness’ has been invested with a special value that goes right to the heart of American identity.
Within this powerful American idea of wilderness something more specific is also being invoked however. Taylor (1991) has made a useful distinction between the world views implied within two broad categories of environmental discourse, each of which draws on different rhetorical strategies to support its perspective. Taylor names the first of these world views ‘expansionist’; this view is predicated on the notion of an ever expanding world economy, with its concomitant need for enhanced exploitation of resources from the natural world. In order to realize a positive outcome for this ‘expansionist world view’, and to invoke the objective of a sustainable long-term environment, this outlook must be embedded in a storyline which Taylor calls ‘wise management’. Each stage of new human incursions into the natural world, in other words, must be carefully assessed for its full repercussions and the process of economic development ‘wisely managed’. In contrast, a second perspective, which in Taylor’s analysis may operate in dialogue with, as well as in opposition to, the first, is called the ‘ecological world view’. This viewpoint stresses the idea that the delicate balance of intersecting ecosystems within the natural environment requires protection from the consequences of ever expanding human exploitation. Hence this outlook must be embedded in the contrastive storyline of ‘conservation’ (Taylor, 1991). These contrastive storylines are not necessarily sealed off from each other, however, since ‘the very same text may be a dialogue of these two voices. Narrative may transcend the constraints of formal logic, according to which contradiction is the most heinous of all sins’ (Harré, Brockmeier and Mühlhäuser, 1999: 70).
Now, although the storyline of Bambi is not explicitly that of ‘conservation’, there is no doubt that the implications of the film are pointed very heavily in this direction. The ‘expansionist’ world view, represented by the human hunters’ desire periodically to exploit the resources of a pristine, natural environment by killing animals, is represented as both fearful and destructive in the film. Not only is the intended outcome of killing game portrayed as a slaughter that disrupts the harmonious relationships and sense of well being of the innocent creatures, but the unintended consequence of ‘Man’s’ intrusion also has even more dire effects. The fire, which is accidentally left to get out of control at the humans’ campsite, wreaks havoc as it progresses in ferocious swathes through the whole terrain at the end of the film. If ever there were a ‘natural environment’ requiring ‘protection from the consequences of … expanding human exploitation’, surely the forest and surrounding land depicted in Bambi is it. The film has the ‘storyline of conservation’ at its very heart.
It is not only the storyline however, but perhaps more significantly also the way the landscape is shot that angles the film’s attachment to ideas of conservation in particular ways. Bambi does not depict a generic American ‘wilderness’ but a rather special one, whose key features set up very strong associations with the first major conservation area formally to be declared a protected region in the United States: the most photographed National Park in the world, Yosemite. Yosemite is an area of spectacular, glacier shaped, rock formations, which frame a river valley rendered especially beautiful through its combination of large open meadows with mixed deciduous woodlands that gradually give way to conifers, including magnificent redwoods, as the land gets higher. It is situated in northeast California, some three hundred miles from the Burbank studios that the Disney team moved into in 1940 and where Bambi was largely made. The area was established as a protected region during the period of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and has gradually acquired iconic status in terms of how North American wilderness is represented. The Yosemite Grant was established by Congress in 1864; it initially awarded control of the valley and Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias to the state of California for perpetuity. When Yosemite became a National Park in 1890, the conservation area was massively expanded from the sixty square miles of the original valley grant, the newly designated National Park covering more than 1500 square miles of the region (Runte, 1993). This protection was not sufficient to prevent a dam and massive reservoir being built in the more northerly sector of the National Park area, the Hetch Hetchy valley, however. Despite vigorous opposition (including the influential voice of John Muir) in one of the most famous political battles in conservation history, the Raker Act of 1913 finally provided a legislative framework that allowed the dam to be built. Thus, in addition to being a site with indisputably iconic significance for the idea of ‘wilderness’ – Rebecca Solnit calls it ‘the very crucible and touchstone for American landscape’ (1994: 221) – Yosemite is also richly embedded in the history and conflicts of the conservation movement.
The association between Bambi and Yosemite National Park can be detected at a number of levels. At the most general level, the establishing sequence of shots at the start of the film focuses on key features broadly similar to those defining the landscape of Yosemite. The forest in Bambi is situated in a river valley, backed off with steep cliffs and rocky terrain that stage the drama of the deer’s escape at the end of the film, but which are glimpsed in more picturesque mode at the beginning. As in the Yosemite valley, the woodland is a mixture of deciduous trees and conifers which, when the camera turns skywards to catch the changing disposition of weather, seem to acquire something of the height and grandeur of the famous sequoias. Bambi features a large open meadow space in the heart of the forest that has rough equivalence to the meadow space that allows such spectacular views in the Yosemite valley for photographers, artists and visitors. But in addition to these broad features of the landscape, it is also the detailed ways in which individual shots are framed that suggest strong parallels with the traditions of landscape photography that have evolved in relation to Yosemite. In the opening sequence, for instance, as the camera tracks down to the riverbed, the trees suddenly open up around the upward course the river has carved out to reveal a waterfall tumbling spectacularly over a sheer cliff face in the medium distance. The shot of the waterfall and rising cliff framed by natural features nearer to the eye is, of course, a standard image in landscape photography and Disney uses versions of it in other films such as The Fox and the Hounds and Tarzan. But the particular form of the framing trees, the angle of the waterfall shots and scale of the background cliffs in Bambi are more fully consonant with perspectives that Ansell Adams and others returned to again and again when photographing the Yosemite waterfalls and the Bridal Falls especially. Bambi scales down the sense of monumental awe created in much of Adams’s work, but the ingredients and angles are strikingly similar. The low angle shots of a succession of rocky, platform promontories used to set off Bambi and his ‘Prince’ father, likewise bear comparison with classic, though more monumental, shots of key features of the Yosemite landscape such as El Capitan and, perhaps especially, Half Dome.
The association of Bambi with both the imagery and forms of representation of Yosemite National Park helps sharpen our sense of what is, and is not, seen in the particular version of pastoral that the film develops. Perhaps the most important element that is excluded from direct representation within the film’s pastoral vision is the human figure itself. No human form is ever shown in the film, even though human actions produce such powerfully emotive effects. This absence is particularly striking since it is specifically human agency that drives so much of the plot, especially in the latter part of the film. While it is also true that, in Felix Salten’s novel, human presence in the animals’ world is registered largely through circumlocutions, designed to capture the animals’ incomprehension of human beings’ enhancement of their natural powers through the technology of weapons, the film’s occlusion of the human figure is much more absolute and also draws on other traditions. In particular, the traditions of landscape representation used within both the photography and painting of Yosemite National Park have almost invariably excluded any sign of humans – or even of human participation – in the scene. As Rebecca Solnit bluntly puts it; ‘In most of the photographs that have made the place familiar to the world, there are no people’ (1994: 221). As a rider to this observation, she goes on to assert that ‘What has been left out of the picture, then, says a lot about how we understand landscape’ (ibid.: 222).
The most obvious result of leaving human beings out of the perspective in the depiction of Yosemite is to enhance the feeling that we are witnessing the beauty of a virgin wilderness, untouched by human presence. It is clear, indeed, that the creation of such a perspective has been a major goal driving conservation policy at a national level in the United States. The 1963 report, Wildlife Management in the National Parks, of a committee chaired by Professor Leopold, for instance, identified as its primary goal ‘that the biotic associations within each park be maintained, or where necessary recreated, as nearly as possible in the condition that prevailed when the area was first visited by the white man … A National Park should represent a vignette of primitive America’. The report went on to suggest that ‘A reasonable illusion of primitive America could be recreated using the utmost skill, judgment, and ecologic sensitivity’ (Runte, 1993: 92). It is noteworthy both how aware the authorities are of the energy and skill needed to recreate such an ‘illusion of primitive America’ and that the criterion invoked in judging the success of such an ‘illusion’ should be the first experience of the environment by a white man. The emotional investment engendered in this form of engagement with virginal landscape thus tends to push to the margins of vision, or even obscure completely, perception of how even the most remote places on earth take their specific form from thousands of years of interaction with human beings, as well as other animals. As Gary Snyder puts it, before Europeans came, ‘North America was all populated … people were everywhere’ (1990: 7); and had been, indeed, for thousands of years. Rebecca Solnit argues more specifically both that the representation of Yosemite as a tourist attraction obscures the history of the Indian wars that enabled jurisdiction (and renaming) of the land to be secured by Europeans and that the continued presence of North American natives in the valley region passes unnoticed in official accounts and visual records. Even the land itself, she argues, has acquired the particular mixture of forest, meadow and plant life that it has today through a whole range of interventions practised by nomadic Indians across the preceding centuries. The occlusion of the human figure from the landscape of Bambi does not enact such a specific process of rendering human history invisible. But it does produce a very selective vision of human interaction with the landscape, eliminating any sense of an evolving interdependency between landscape and human activity and heightening the audience’s feeling for a natural world that is entirely separate.
Nevertheless, Bambi does link, in a range of important ways, to ideas and ideologies that have informed the practice of conservation in the United States especially. Consider, for instance, the following passage from early on in Felix Salten’s novel; here the author offers a fundamental lesson both to the infant deer and the young reader about how the natural world operates:
Bambi was in high spirits and felt like leaping off the path, but he stayed close to his mother. Something rustled in front of them, close to the ground. The fern fronds and wood lettuce concealed something that advanced in violent motion. A threadlike little cry shrilled out piteously; then all was still. Only the leaves and the blades of grass shivered back into place. A ferret had caught a mouse. He came slinking by, slid sideways, and prepared to enjoy his meal. (1998: 16)
The death of the small creature is rendered with full empathetic feeling here, particularly in the ‘little cry’ that ‘shrilled out piteously’; but the insight the passage is designed to develop is ultimately unsentimental. The passage is not untypical of the way Salten uses the novel to contemplate the sway of mortality within nature that underpins his other major themes.
Yet there is nothing like this in Disney’s Bambi – there, no predators appear to exist in the forest world other than the occasional incursions by ‘man’. It might be tempting to see this change in tone and perspective from the novel as one more instance of Disney’s habitual drive to sentimentalize. However, other Disney films (The Jungle Book, The Lion King, even the early Song of the South) develop the theme of wild creatures’ predatory instincts in relation to each other strongly.
The ‘illusion’ of primitive nature that was being created within America’s National Parks from the beginning of the twentieth century was, on the other hand, based on principles much more in key with Disney’s presentation of the natural order in Bambi. For here the policy was to rid the parks of as many of the major predatory species as possible. Joseph Grimell, whose ideas and advocacy of Yosemite National Park did much to promote the area and prevent further damage after John Muir’s death in 1914, argued vigorously that this policy should be changed. In an influential article published in the journal Science in 1916, he made a stand for the principle that National Parks should not be ‘sanitized and civilized’. This meant that ‘predaceous animals [too] should be left unmolested and allowed to retain their primitive relation to the rest of the fauna’. Instead of human intervention culling predators in order to favour what were thought of as more ‘desirable’ species, Grimell argued for an ecological understanding of relationships between species in the natural environment. Predator numbers, he suggested, would be ‘kept within proper limits by the available food supply; nothing is to be gained by reducing [their numbers] still further’ (Runte, 1993: 88–90). Grimell’s views did not gain acceptance until after a long period of debate however. Runte states that:
The Park Service disagreed [with Grimell], and, in fact, pursued a vigorous program against predatory animals until 1931, fully fifteen years after Grimell and Storer’s path breaking article in Science. The Park service had succumbed, in effect, to nineteenth century visions of National Parks as scenery. (ibid.: 90)
By the time the Park service had acceded to Grimell’s view, ‘many predatory animals had been systematically eradicated from the major Western parks’ (ibid.). Parallels between the early twentieth-century Park Service’s ideal of ‘beautiful nature’ and the selective version of the natural order that informs Disney’s Bambi are thus striking. Characteristically, the Disney film is nostalgically invoking a nineteenth-century ideal of nature that is ‘conserved’ by having its more unpleasant features systematically culled. It is interesting that the result of pursuing this policy in real life was an over-expansion of grazing herds. This, in turn, upset the ecological balance (particularly evident at Yellowstone National Park) and threatened to change both the distribution of plant life and the way the landscape ‘looked’. It was this threat to the ‘recreated illusion of primitive America’ in the landscape, as much as Grimell’s arguments, that finally persuaded the Park Service to shift its policy.
The most dramatic change that Disney’s film effects on the plot of Felix Salten’s novel, however, is undoubtedly the climactic fire that appears to ravage the whole region in the wake of the humans’ hunting expedition. Although the film’s primary focus is on the main protagonists, Bambi and his father Prince, this sequence is distinguished stylistically by editing techniques and camera angles that suggest the significance of the fire is much wider than its immediate impact on the fate of Bambi.
The sequence opens with an image of flames from the hunters’ unattended campfire licking their way along the dried grass and dead timber that is strewn across the ground, till they reach the surrounding trees. This is followed by an extended series of linked panning shots that follow the flames’ terrifyingly swift progress through the forest, whilst also registering the effect of the fire on the smaller fleeing animals. When, eventually, the film cross-cuts to Prince and the wounded Bambi on a rocky platform in the higher ground, the camera takes up a characteristic medium range position, so that Bambi’s prostrate form will have maximum impact on the natural stage that foregrounds his body. But as Bambi, prompted by his father’s ministrations, recovers enough energy to flee, the camera is moved back to a medium/long range position that reduces the size of the animals within the frame and enables much more of the surrounding environment to be taken in by the viewer. The effect of this stylistic shift from the medium/close range shots that predominate in most of the rest of the film is partly to emphasize the vulnerability of the animals. The fleeing deer look much smaller with the towering, blazing trees now dominating them from above. But the longer range viewpoint also makes us aware of the fire’s devastating impact on a whole environment and that the creatures, with whom we identify strongly in this dramatically intense moment, form a small part of the larger natural world which is now threatened. This secondary effect is reinforced by the way the film is edited. After we have witnessed the stags’ desperate final bid to escape the pursuing flames, by leaping from the top of a waterfall, we expect the dramatic tension to be maintained by following the stags’ swimming through the water. Instead, the film begins by panning slowly along the river to suggest the stags’ possible progress, but then dissolves and crosscuts to a small island, safely situated in the middle of a lake. Here we are aware once again, not just of the deer (Bambi’s partner Faline is seen anxiously waiting at the edge of the island) but, more significantly, of the sheer variety of animal life affected. The forms of rabbits, partridges, innumerable birds, raccoons, opossum, mice and squirrels are all clearly identifiable as they gather on the crowded space of the island and the specificity of the animal images extends the viewer’s sense of the fire as an environmental, rather than individually focused, catastrophe.
I have dwelt on the stylistic features of this penultimate episode at some length because these enable the film to extend its range of meanings and to engage, potentially, with larger ideas about the relationship between fire and the natural environment. During the period in which the film was made, the authorities responsible for maintaining wild areas in the United States, particularly the Parks Service and Forest Commission, took a very active role in trying to prevent all fires within protected natural areas. The obvious rationale for this, consistent with the impact of the imagery of fire within Bambi, was that fires had a destructive, and potentially disastrous, effect on the natural environment.
However, fires within natural environments may actually come about through a number of causes and have varied consequences. Some, of course, like those started by bolts of lightning, are entirely natural. These tend to be a very small proportion however, compared to fires whose origins can be traced to various forms of human agency. Karl Jacoby’s statistics on the causes of fire within New York State Forest Preserve Counties between 1891 and 1913, for instance, indicate only 3 per cent of recorded fires that could be definitely attributed to natural causes, compared to 71 per cent with a clear human origin (2001: 74–5). But even the fires started by human beings show marked variations both in intention and effect. Many fires are an accidental or careless side effect of a range of human activities that take place within natural environments, from semi-industrial practices, such as building railways, sawmills or blasting, to the carelessness of visitors to country areas; hunters, campers, smokers and so on. But a significant proportion of fires (33 per cent in the survey Jacoby quotes) are started deliberately and for a variety of reasons. Farmers may start fires to clear land or burn stubble to prepare for new planting, berry pickers to encourage the growth of a new crop of berries at the end of a season, bee-keepers to stimulate the growth of pollinating plants that produce nectar. Even hunters, responsible for the fire that has such devastating impact in Bambi, may start fires deliberately, not only as a strategy to drive animals into places where they can be more easily killed, but also to maintain or create new browsing areas for deer and other game. This was also one of the main reasons why North American Indians set fires, a practice that appears to go back thousands of years and is likely to have influenced the quality and distribution of plant life in positive ways within nearly all areas of North America.
It is important to recognize this range of human practices causing fires in rural environments because public policy in the United States has tended to oppose the uses local groups make of conservation areas and to view local practices, in a wholesale manner, as environmentally destructive. Karl Jacoby suggests that this attitude had a strong class and ethnic bias. Professionals working on conservation projects tended to perceive the rural populace as ‘engaged in “unwise” environmental practices that would have potentially catastrophic environmental consequences if left unchecked’ (ibid.: 15).
This, of course, is precisely the implication of the images of hunting and the resulting fire at the end of Bambi. While Jacoby acknowledges that the ‘settlement of the American countryside was accompanied by tremendous ecological devastation as settlers endeavoured to find marketable goods and remake the “wild” nature they encountered into a more familiar world of fields and fences’ (ibid.: 49), he argues that conservationist narratives have tended to use this image to obscure many variations in local practices and to deny the validity of less powerful groups’ viewpoints and competing interests. Such competing interests often pitched rural communities in opposition, not only to rich private landowners, but also to administrators of public conservation areas.
During the thirty-year period before Bambi was made, these competing interests acquired a particularly sharp and public focus, as the policies informing modern fire management within wilderness areas were both strongly contested and took shape. As Stephen Pyne has argued, this controversy was fuelled by what was ‘at base a conflict between two sets of fire practices: one set learned largely from Indians and sustained by a frontier economy of hunting, herding and shifting agriculture; the other set, better suited to industrial forestry’ (1982: 101). Pyne, indeed, suggests even broader implications for this conflict when he claims, starkly, that the ‘history of modern fire protection is basically the story of how one fire regime, that of the frontier economies, was replaced by another, that of an industrial state’ (ibid.: 82). By the time Bambi was produced, National Parks’ policy on wilderness fires had been settled decisively in line with practices shaped by the interests of industrial forestry, but not before a fierce debate had taken place which, in California at least, was eventually opened up to a wide audience in the very public arena of popular magazines. This debate came to be called the ‘light burn’ controversy. On one side of the debate, the Forest and Park Services were driven increasingly to close ranks around a policy of systematically suppressing all fires within natural environments. As Kenneth Walker, representing the views of the California Board of Forestry in 1950, put it, ‘We don’t want fire under any conditions in the woods’ (ibid.: 112). Pitched against the advocates of this position was a loose alliance of local practitioners, who ‘insisted that by broadcast underburning they were following “the Indian way” of wise forest management; foresters dismissed this proposition as mere “Paiute forestry”’ (ibid.).
What is especially interesting here is that, underlying the debate about fire practices, lay a more fundamental controversy about the very meaning of ‘wilderness’ and our understanding of how it had been formed. For many decades in the early twentieth century, environmental historians and anthropologists (despite the overwhelming evidence of frontiersmen and early settlers, whose testimony they mistrusted) fell into line with the Forest Service by asserting that it had never been the practice of American Indians to set fire to the land deliberately. Since the Indian way of life was perceived, almost axiomatically, as being close to the land, it was inconceivable that they could systematically practise something that, according to the modern technical and scientific thought which underpinned the Forest Service’s position, was environmentally harmful. Only when, from the late 1960s onwards, the Forest and Parks Service changed policy and began to incorporate elements of traditional practice into their fire regime, did the extent of Native Americans’ use of burning begin to be fully acknowledged. This represented not so much a shift of emphasis as a change in the whole underlying paradigm. As it began to be accepted that periodic fires could have beneficial effects, so it was also recognized that fires had been used to affect the environment by hunting, gathering and herding communities within all societies (including the American Indians) throughout history. In the process of this radical shift in attitude and thinking, the whole image of what the wilderness actually was – that ‘powerful mirage of the virgin forest myth’ (ibid.: 81) that had held both academic writing and the popular imagination in its grip for decades – had to be changed.
Central to that changed perception was the role Native Americans had played in shaping the very constitution of the landscape which Europeans discovered as they explored and took over America. Fire was utterly central to that shaping process. Jacoby, for instance, describes how,
Among many Indian peoples, including the Bannock, Shoshone, and Crow, it was customary for experienced tribe members to kindle fires in order to drive game animals to locations where they might be killed by waiting hunters. By burning underbrush and dead wood, low-level fires of this sort also helped to recycle nutrients into the soil and create a mosaic of plant varieties at various levels of succession, raising the level of vegetational diversity and opening up a variety of ecological niches for wildlife. The benefits of fire were therefore not only short-term (facilitating travel and the taking of game) but long term as well (maintaining a higher level of wildlife than would have occurred otherwise). (2001: 86)
Rebecca Solnit makes a similar case, claiming that ‘at least one hundred tribes of North America used fire for at least fifteen purposes, but nearly all of these dramatically affected the landscape and the ecosystem …’ (1994: 297). She goes on to quote Sue Fritzke’s claims that what is perceived as the ‘primitive and untouched’ mixture of flora and fauna in the Yosemite valley is in fact almost entirely the result of a range of Indian practices, including fire setting, that had subtly altered the environment over thousands of years before it was ‘discovered’ by white men. Without this, ‘the valley might have been nothing more than a dense forest of conifers’ (ibid.: 307). The long-term result of the National Parks policy of attempting to suppress all types of conflagration was actually to increase the intensity of fires when they did occur.
In 1988, Yellowstone had devastating forest fires as a result of the long-term policy of fire suppression, and in 1990 Yosemite also had fires whose ferocity was brought about by a century of suppression and years of drought, serious enough that the valley was evacuated. Old trees that might have survived a superficial fire burned through in the huge flames that fed on decades of accumulated [forest] litter. (ibid.: 300)
The policy of fire suppression was related to a more general suspicion of (or even hostility towards) the practices of a range of local land users; its implementation over a prolonged period had an impact not only immediately (and sometimes drastically) on established modes of living of the rural communities involved, but eventually also on the land itself.
Beneath the apparently straightforward portrayal of fire within Bambi, as an indictment of humanity’s brutal and careless intrusion into the innocence of the natural world, then, there lies a complex history of changing philosophies, understanding and social practices. It is possible to construe the images of fire deployed within Bambi as standing in a fairly simple, conservative relationship to this complex underlying history. The film’s fire images could be thought of as wholly congruent with what had become the dominant ideological position by the 1930s and 1940s; fire seen as a destructive force with a detrimental and potentially devastating impact on wilderness environments, whose pre-Columbian, ‘natural’ state was conceived of as largely untouched by conflagration. Support for seeing the film as aligned unquestioningly with official government attitudes can be found in the way Bambi was subsequently used within advertising campaigns seeking to raise public awareness of the dangers of fire-lighting in the countryside. David Ingram notes that in ‘1944, the Wartime Advertising Council used the image of Bambi in its fire preservation campaign, thereby appropriating the movie for its conservationist agenda’ (2000: 19). It was only after problems with licensing this use of the film had occurred that the Bambi image was replaced as a propaganda icon by the familiar figure of Smokey the Bear. Even if one reads the alignment of the film in this straightforward way however, it is still important to understand what has been left out or selectively distilled from the more complex history of fire in creating the environmental drama of the film’s climax. Such choices structure, at a deep level, viewers’ attitudes and feelings towards the natural world. It is also possible, though, to argue that the film mediates conflicting attitudes within contemporary discourses surrounding fire in less simple forms. Could there be elements of the film that engender a potentially more ambiguous or complex awareness of the processes linking fire to our perception of the natural world? To explore this possibility a little further we need to look in more detail at the imagery deployed in the film’s ending.
The images of a devastated environment with which Bambi closes are not quite as straightforward as might at first appear. After the penultimate sequence in which a representative selection of the animals find sanctuary from the fire on the island, the film signals a movement forward in space and time by cutting to a very different scene. We now find ourselves back in the forest region where the film started, the presence of flowers and new growth eventually marking this as the following spring. Our return to this landscape of origins is conveyed, initially, through a prolonged panning and establishing shot. Here the contrast between the former, richly textured, light-dappled, living forms of the climax forest and the present, uniformly charred environment could not be starker. The subtle shades and misty, lyrical beauty of the natural world, so evident in the film’s opening, are replaced by blackened stumps of the few trees now left standing – a bleak elegy to the wasted fertility of the scorched earth beneath. The long panning shot comes to rest, however, on the oak tree that is home to the forest’s elder statesman–commentator, Friend Owl. Here the mise-en-scène that shapes our emotional relationship to the landscape undergoes a decisive shift. For the oak tree, though blackened slightly in places, has leaves and does not appear substantially damaged. When, a little later, we track further right through the forest towards the thicket where Bambi was born, the woodland looks thinned out, but intact, with patches of still charred ground already sprouting new spring flowers and vegetation. Hence we close with what is, in effect, a double vision of the seared, forest environment that we can read, ambiguously, as both devastated and regenerating.
Clearly this ‘double vision’ does service within the cyclical structure of the narrative. The film begins and ends with the birth of fauns; the dramatic crisis that shapes its penultimate phase is supplanted by an image of cyclical renewal that represents the film’s ultimate vision and faith in natural process. But, if one takes account of the histories and debates that surround the image of fire that Bambi draws on, it is also possible to see the film as more multivalent. For the double vision of the ending, though ultimately reassuring, also re-enacts the key terms of contemporary debates on the effects of fire on the natural environment. Is fire itself an agent of renewal and change that helps the environment to attain its maximum potential in terms of richness and diversity? Or is it a purely destructive force, ultimately aligned to fallen mankind’s greed and insensitivity towards the natural world, the very antithesis of environmental responsibility? One’s answer, within the framework that the film constructs, would appear to depend on whether the gaze rests on the landscape to the left or to the right of the oak tree that is placed liminally between competing images of fire’s environmental consequences. In fact, of course, the film drives onwards, its sentimental closure no doubt discouraging the viewer from posing this question at a conscious level. But the contradictory images that sustain our progress towards this ending do open up a potential space for more resistant readings and suggest that the film’s pastoral take on the Eden story may be less simple, and less sealed off from the contradictory pressures of historical process, than at first appears.
What is at stake here is not so much a largely intellectual debate as to how the film should properly be interpreted but more a sense that the feelings, attachments and understandings generated by the film are important and can move us in different directions. Evidence that the film may connect with audiences in a multiplicity of ways can be gleaned from viewers’ responses from different periods in which Bambi has been released. Even from its opening, it is clear that Bambi was capable of eliciting a strong reaction from sections of its audience with a particular stake in the environmental agendas that are dramatized in the film. Ralph Lutts, for instance, has noted how, from the start, the ‘film’s immediate impact was not limited to children. It also shaped the opinions of many adults’ (1992: 162). The feeling that the film had unusual power in shaping public opinion lay behind determined opposition to Bambi from the hunting lobby, who began to campaign against the movie even before it was released (ibid.). The film’s potential to shape feelings and attachments may not have been fully realized initially however. Despite generally favourable reviews, audience figures after the film’s first release were disappointing and Disney failed to cover the film’s production costs. This may well have been due to the way the onset of World War II influenced audiences’ susceptibilities. Though Bambi is not in any obvious sense about war, its feeling for a pure, natural world that is a retreat from aggressive and predatory human instincts links strongly with the isolationist, non-intervention policies that held sway in American politics up till 1942. Walt Disney, in fact, had been broadly in sympathy with such non-interventionist policies throughout the period that Bambi was in production. By the time the film came out in August 1942 however (ironically on the ‘glorious Twelfth’, the start of the grouse shooting season in Britain), the bombing of Pearl Harbor had brought the United States decisively into engagement in World War II. The emotional charge of a charming film about innocent and peaceful nature had perhaps lost its historical moment, as the American people geared themselves up for commitment to the harsh realities of the war effort. The film was more successful when it was re-released in 1948 and, especially, in subsequent releases in the 1950s. From this stage onwards it clearly began to strike an imaginative chord with wider audiences and, by the time it was made available in a video format in 1990, Bambi had become the third largest grossing motion picture in history, eclipsed only by Gone With the Wind and The Sound of Music (Lutts, 1992: 168). The effect of the film can be gauged not just from the numbers attracted to film theatres; the name ‘Bambi’ acquired iconic significance within discourses and debates about hunting, being used in largely derogatory fashion in phrases such as the ‘Bambi factor’ and ‘Bambi syndrome’ to typecast the sentiments of liberal opposition: and a generation of committed environmentalists. who first saw the film in the 1950s, acknowledged the power its imagery had exerted in laying the emotional groundwork for their subsequent political engagement. In many ways then, Bambi could lay claim to being the most important of all Disney’s films dealing with wild nature. Both the depth and range of the engagement with environmental ideas that it seems to have fostered go far beyond what might be expected from a sentimental animated children’s feature. What is it, one might ask, in the film that accounts for this?
One answer to this question lies, I would suggest, in the way Bambi pushed to its limits the animated medium’s capacity to incorporate elements of realism. The extent to which realism in Bambi may have challenged audiences’ expectations of the form can be judged by the uncomfortable responses of a number of reviewers. Richard Schickel, for instance, in a biography of Walt Disney that was first published in 1968, quotes approvingly from a 1942 review in the New York Times: ‘One cannot combine naturalism with cartoon fantasy … [It] throws into relief the failure of pen and brush to catch the fluent movement of real photography’ (1986: 268). Schickel expresses his own aesthetic reservations about the form of Bambi, when he suggests that the ‘deer [in Bambi] were rather too carefully naturalistic’ (ibid.: 176). Moreover other critical responses to the film, deriving from a sense that it is ‘carefully naturalistic’, have not been limited to aesthetic judgments. The naturalistic style has opened the film up to much more stringent comparisons with ‘real nature’ than would be the case with most animations. Paradoxically, this has resulted in Bambi being criticized, especially in more recent, ecologically attuned writing, for failing to be realistic enough and thus presenting a false image of the natural world. David Ingram, for instance, takes Bambi to task for being founded on a static, idealized image of the ‘balance of nature’ (2000: 18–20), whereas the reality of ‘nature as understood by contemporary scientific ecology is chaotic and unstable’ (ibid.: 19). Ingram goes on to quote approvingly Paul Schullery’s critique of ‘Bambi for perpetuating outdated ideas on the role of fire in nature’, a judgement which concludes with Schullery’s dark warning that, in the wake of the 1990 release of Bambi in a video format, children will be inculcated in ecological lessons ‘that were discarded by fire ecologists decades ago, and these lessons are not good enough in today’s environmentally attuned world’(ibid.: 20). Ralph Lutts goes even further in his 1992 article. Whilst acknowledging that ‘Bambi has become one of our most widespread and emotionally powerful national symbols of nature, one that motivates deep concern and dedicated action to promote wildlife’, Lutts nevertheless roundly indicts the film as ‘an empty symbol, because the concept of nature that (Disney’s) fawn represents is impoverished’. Hence Bambi‘motivates but it does not educate. It may stimulate action but not understanding’ (1992: 169).
Lutts’s case against the film of Bambi is based on a detailed comparison with Felix Salten’s book. The film version comes out as ‘impoverished’ in this comparison because, despite the artistic care that has been lavished on rendering a whole range of details naturalistically, key elements in the real natural world are seen through a seriously distorting lens. Alongside the (mis)representation of fire and the licence taken in making animal behaviour more amusing (such as the opossums sleeping hanging by their tails from branches), the most crucial changes Lutts detects in the Disney film relate to distortions in the deer’s bodies (designed to make them cuter and more human) and the absence of predators we have noted earlier. The combined effect of these changes, it is argued, is to displace the philosophical depth of Salten’s exploration of what nature means to humanity onto a more facile plane of anthropocentric identification and to offer false images of both animal behaviour and ecology.
In making the gap between the film’s ability to move audiences and the false premises on which this engagement is based so clear, Lutts’s assessment raises some extremely important questions. Are we right to judge dramatized, fictional narratives for children according to such rigorous criteria for verisimilitude? If a film ‘motivates deep concern and dedicated action to promote wildlife’ in its audience, does it matter if this response is founded on a sentimental and distorted image of the way the natural world functions? And, in making current scientific thought the standard to which fictional narratives should aspire, are we trying to subordinate the complex web of our emotional intelligence and sympathies to a one-dimensional grid of intellectual paradigms? The role of fantasy – and myth – in expressing the multifaceted loops and paradoxes of our connection to nature is, after all, deeply embedded in our collective, historical psyche and it is not clear what space is left for such a role if we adopt too naïve a standard of intellectual truth. These are complex questions to address and I will return to examine some of the implications for other aspects of Disney’s work in later chapters. For the moment though, I would like to focus these questions in a narrower way in relation to Bambi, and to suggest that, though the information gathered in approaches such as Lutts’s is extremely valuable, the conclusions that are drawn may need further scrutiny and qualification.
Consider, for instance, the death of Bambi’s mother, an aspect of the film that nearly all viewers remember as particularly powerful and moving. It might be argued, indeed, that this is a key episode in securing an emotional impact for the film capable of generating ‘deep concern and dedicated action’ amongst viewers. But to what extent is the profound emotional impact of this scene based on false ideas of processes in the natural world? It is true, certainly, that the emotional impact of the episode is heightened and made more likely to more prompt viewers to want to protect an innocent nature by making man the only predator interested in killing deer. It is true also that our emotional identification with the deer is intensified by drawing them in ways that add or emphasize features that make them look like humans; enlarging the head and making the muzzle smaller so the deer can become more expressive, giving them enormous, appealing eyes and adding human attributes such as pupils and eyelashes. But there are other aspects to the way the scene is played out which, if they do not cancel its anthropocentric sentiment, certainly enlarge the perceptual field within which this is grounded.
The sequence begins, for instance, with Bambi and his mother eating the new spring grass that is emerging in patches through the snow in the open space of the meadow. This medium range shot, angled from somewhat above ground level so that we look down on the grazing animals, is distinctive and makes us keenly aware of their vulnerability in an environment characterized by wide open space. The effect is reinforced by cross cutting to close range shots of the adult deer raising her head repeatedly and apprehensively, as she scans the surrounding landscape for signs of possible danger. When, a few seconds later, the animals flee in alarm, the camera follows their flight at medium distance in a continuous tracking shot, the speed of movement enabling the eye to focus only on isolated features in the immediate environment that might impede the creatures’ progress. Bambi’s mother’s death, of course, famously takes place off camera, while we continue to follow the young deer’s flight to the safety of his thicket den in the heart of the forest. At this point, as Bambi begins to look back into the forest for his mother, the style of the drawings changes. Instead of the spare, uncluttered mode which was adopted in representing both the snow covered, open space and the deer’s flight, the surroundings are now delineated in full sensuous detail again. The perceptual richness of our relationship to an intimately known, ‘home’ environment is poignantly restored just as the full impact of loss and change begins to be registered. Finally, the snow, which begins to fall heavily, blurs our perception of the surrounding environment in a mode that is analogous to eyes becoming watery with grief, but which retains a strange air of transforming purity in the moving white veil that covers everything.
My point, in analysing the detail of how this justly famous scene is rendered, is that our emotional involvement is not only engendered through perceiving what happens to the creatures with whom we identify. Our perception of the changing environments that define the animals’ mode of being in the world is just as significant. Kay Milton has argued that, caught up as we are in a view of emotions as engendered by our social relationships, we tend to ignore the degree to which feelings can operate powerfully in the relationship between individual creatures and their environment (2002). This neglected dimension of our emotional intelligence may be an important aspect of environmental politics and certainly promotes insights that are far from simple. In the scene in which Bambi’s mother dies, we are aware throughout of how the animals’ attention is directed towards the world around them and how this, in turn, shapes our empathetic engagement. At each stage it is the animals’ gaze – the way they are configured as taking in their surroundings – that directs us. The apprehensive, surveying gaze of the grazing deer gives way to focused awareness solely of features to be navigated around in the flight path; thence to taking in the comforting detail of a familiar environment experienced in safety; and, finally, to the transformed world, dimly glimpsed through grief, for which the falling snow provides a compelling visual metaphor. What we learn from this film experience is surely not as straightforward as a set of distorted paradigms of the way the natural world around us operates, nor does it work simply as a displacement of human loss onto animal forms. The animal figures are also teaching children how to look at significant detail in the world around them and to integrate these perceptions within their whole emotional response. It is this, just as much as the special weight that we give to a child’s loss of its mother, that has enabled Bambi to influence viewers in unusually profound ways and to motivate long-term engagement with wider environmental agendas. The ‘facts’ may be distorted but the process of engagement and the sensitivity to nature that the film encourages have a capacity to connect with viewers in more fundamental ways.