Until now, English-language readers had to rely on the Chambers translation-which, thanks to a controversial copyright ruling, has been the only one available for almost a century. The original version, meanwhile, was banned and burned in Nazi Germany, where it was regarded as a parable about the treatment of Jews in Europe.Īs that suggests, “Bambi” the book is even darker than “Bambi” the movie. The English-language version, as translated in 1928 by the soon to be Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers, was enormously popular, earning rave reviews and selling six hundred and fifty thousand copies in the dozen-plus years before the film came out. And it rendered the original “Bambi” obscure, too, even though it had previously been both widely acclaimed and passionately reviled.
The book rendered Salten famous the movie, which altered and overshadowed its source material, rendered him virtually unknown. It was adapted from “Bambi: A Life in the Woods,” a 1922 novel by the Austro-Hungarian writer and critic Felix Salten. Unlike many other Disney classics, from “ Cinderella” to “ Frozen,” this fright fest is not based on a fairy tale. Stephen King called “Bambi” the first horror movie he ever saw, and Pauline Kael, the longtime film critic for this magazine, claimed that she had never known children to be as frightened by supposedly scary grownup movies as they were by “Bambi.” The film in question is, of course, the 1942 Walt Disney classic “ Bambi.” Perhaps more than any other movie made for children, it is remembered chiefly for its moments of terror: not only the killing of the hero’s mother but the forest fire that threatens all the main characters with annihilation. We see only the mother’s sudden alarm her panicked attempt to get her child to safety their separation in the chaos of the moment and then the child, outside in the cold as snow once again begins to fall, alone and crying for his mother. In fact, we never see it at all, because the man with the gun remains offscreen. Beguiled by the changing weather, we do not see the danger coming. A mother and her child are out for a walk, on the first warm day after a bitter winter.
It is one of the most famous murders in the history of cinema.
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