11/5/2022 0 Comments Thumper bambi folding arms![]() ![]() 4 An idiosyncrasy of the journalism of its day, the feuilleton joined criticism, exposition, and literature to make an unabashedly subjective essay that ran below the fold on the newspaper’s front page. He belonged to a generation of literati that came of age in the 1890s-the so-called Young Vienna set-which included the giants of fin-de-siècle Austrian literature, among whom Salten would become the most prominent journalist.īeginning in 1912, Salten occupied a prestigious position as a feuilletonist for Vienna’s premier newspaper, the Neue Freie Presse, where he remained until shortly after the Anschluss. Salten’s parallel interests in urban culture and the world of nature turned him into an ambassador for both. “Bambi would never have come into being,” he wrote, “if I had never aimed my bullet at the head of a roebuck or an elk.” 3īorn Sigmund Salzmann to a Jewish family from Pest, Hungary, Salten was already a successful journalist when he began work on Bambi a few years after the First World War. 2 In fact, it was precisely his experience observing animals in nature, from his childhood hikes in the Vienna Woods to his adult forays into the hunting preserve at Stockerau, that led him to believe that thinking souls dwelled in the bodies of those animals. An avid hunter, he killed around two hundred roebucks in his lifetime. 1 The enduring moral impact of the film has been to generate a prejudice against hunting specifically. For all the attention that the animators paid to the naturalistic depiction of wildlife-down to perfecting the perspective on Bambi’s antlers as he turns his head-concern for what animals actually do in the wild went by the wayside, and Bambi, Thumper, Flower, and Friend Owl became comic caricatures. Man, for instance, is the only predator in Disney’s Bambi. A couple of magpies flew down at once to begin their meal.”Īlthough the film evokes sympathy for its animal characters, it does so only by jettisoning some realities of nature. … He ran about for an hour, then suddenly crumpled up, fell across a branch, and dropped dead in the snow. This, for example, is the fate of one of Bambi’s neighbors: “Another time the squirrel raced about with a great wound in his neck where the ferret had caught him. Moreover, Bambi’s forest is a brutal place, far from the idyll envisioned in the film. With the exception of talking, his animals never do anything of which their real-life counterparts would be incapable. Yet Salten mostly maintained fidelity to nature. In his animal characters, Salten emphasized, without inventing, all the qualities that in humans persuade us of their moral worth: individuality, subjectivity, and-to turn to the German term- Leidensfähigkeit, or the capacity for suffering. ![]() Bambi should remind us that animals are more than instinct-driven machines-they are conscious beings with their own histories, entitled to moral consideration of the same quality, if not the same content, as that accorded to human beings. The forgotten Bambi offers a lesson that the film forgoes and that has been sorely missed, especially in America, where prohibitions on cruelty to animals remain riddled with loopholes. His life in the woods is merely a childhood. ![]() Thanks largely to the film, Bambi became an eternal fawn, forever the clumsy creature frolicking with Thumper. Over the decades, however, a patina of sentimentality settled upon Bambi, obscuring its original defense of animal selfhood and leaving its title character locked in a prison of cuteness. It is an early environmental novel based on the notion that animals are unique individuals. Despite the talking animals, Bambi is a realistic tale of life in the woods that does not shrink from the beauty or the ugliness of nature. ![]() Felix Salten’s Bambi: A Life in the Woods-which first appeared in English 90 years ago this summer-is now better known as the inspiration for Disney’s charming children’s fable, with its poignant, if traumatic, introduction to mortality. ![]()
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