Zipes' translation is "basically word-for-word identical" to Chambers' long-standing English version, according to environmental historian Ralph Lutts.īut closer inspection will reveal "subtle but significant" differences, owing largely to Zipes' understanding of the Austrian version of the German language, in which Salten wrote. A 'subtle but significant' new translation If anything, Bambi has simply learned to live alone … destined to lead a lonely life of survival," he writes in his foreword.
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"Even when Bambi does learn how to avoid death and destruction, he is not a happy roebuck at the end of the novel.
Bambi, he explains, spends most of his time learning from his mother, and later the prince of the forest, how to survive.Īnd despite it ending more or less the same way as the film, Salten's message is altogether more bleak. Salten's A Life in the Forest follows the German genre of a Bildungsroman, or a novel of education, according to Zipes. "Individuals who have assimilated into and become defenders of the culture of their subjugators, whether out of craven self-interest or because, like Gobo, they are sincerely enamoured of it and convinced that their affection is reciprocated." "Every subjugated minority is familiar with figures like Gobo," wrote Schulz. The first Toy Story script starred a creepy dummy, and Woody was 'a jerk,' says researcher.Q&A It might not be a religion, but Disney is sacred ground to its own congregation Animals regularly hunt and prey upon each other, in a graphic yet dispassionate depiction of the natural cycles of life and death. Salten's text, on the other hand, often depicts death and violence. While many remember the short, sharp violence of Bambi's mother's death, the Disney film largely presents the forest's animal denizens as living in harmony with little to no conflict. Bambi then spends time with his implied father, the prince of the forest, before returning to the other animals and siring fawns of his own with his female partner Faline. We are introduced to a female deer and her newborn fawn Bambi, who meets other animals of the forest in his youth.ĭuring a visit to the open meadow, his mother is shot dead by human hunters. Salten's A Life in the Forest roughly touches upon most of the story familiar to Disney fans. "Book-to-film is always a hard thing to pull off, especially when you're trying to adapt a story to a very different audience," she said. Writer and critic Farah Abdessamad notes, however, that it may not be fair to directly compare the two, since Salten's work was written for adult readers while Disney's version always had young viewers in mind. was not particularly suitable for children, until Disney bowdlerized it to fit the bill," wrote the New Yorker's Kathryn Schulz.
"While the film has moments of charm and beauty, it dilutes the violence and tension of Salten's novella," Charlie Tyson wrote for the Yale Review. A multitude of scholars and critics have noted how the 110-minute film stripped away many supporting characters, subplots and grim situations to create a production suitable for all ages. Zipes is not alone in this assessment of Disney's adaptation. The first popular English translation published in 1928 by Whittaker Chambers (an American writer, later Soviet spy-turned-defector) would eventually become the basis for Disney's animated film. The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest, is newly translated with an introduction by Zipes, and includes new illustrations by Alenka Sottler. And he was really addressing in a metaphorical way the problems that Europe was having," said Jack Zipes, a folklore expert and professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. "He really wrote this book, Bambi, not for children, but for adults. But a new translation of the original text, published 100 years ago, hopes to reveal the complex - and, at times, much darker - story at its core.īambi, a Life in the Forest (sometimes translated as Bambi, a Life in the Woods) was written by Felix Salten, of Hungarian Jewish descent and living in Vienna, and was published in 1922. The Sunday Magazine 9:35 Bambi at 100: Not the Disney classic you thought you knewīambi is one of the cornerstones of Disney's oeuvre of classic family-friendly films.
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