I had some vague notion of the plot and due to my preconceptions about the movie expected not to like it. The first half of the movie is a coming of age story and the second half the rest of the life of the now grown-up deer called Bambi. I wasn’t expecting to like it because I thought it would all be saccharine cute and cuddly, since most of the pictures of Bambi seem to imply that. And surely that’s a big part of it.
But I’m also a sucker for some well done depictions of nature. And Bambi has some breathtaking beautiful forest scenes. There’s still the overbearing Disney cuteness going on and the whole anthropomorphic depiction of animals is slightly annoying, but the movie looked just too good to stop me from enjoying it. I was also surprised how negative and menacing humans are depicted in the movie. There’s no time when you think the typical Disneyfication has set in.
The plot is a bit too disjointed, trying to squish a whole lifetime into two hours doesn’t work too well, especially in the second part. But despite the many weaknesses, it’s probably my favorite early Disney movie.
