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Bambi

  • Director: David Hand
  • Year: 1942
  • Run-time: 1 hr 10 min
- Bambi is the last of the original Disney feature run to be on the list. I like the film, but I admit it's a bit of an anomaly in this line-up. Only rarely is it very funny, it doesn't contain much animated whimsy of the previous films, and it doesn't really have a clear moral through-line. But it is a beautiful film, perhaps the most beautiful since Fantasia, with which it shares the most in common, and it's a heartbreaking film at times.

- My wife likes the fact that the animals behave like animals in their broad strokes - thus there are no deer fathers (including Bambi himself), and the motivations are pretty immediate and short-term (all of the animals fall immediately in love in one of the film's laziest sequences). I don't mind the idea of that, but it creates a real clash with their anthromorphic design and dialogue that makes the film a bit unsettling, and as I've said above, there is no real moral takeaway. I'm not claiming that in itself is a bad thing, but it's hard to take away anything substantial from this movie.

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