ABSTRACT
In surveys of people’s traumatic childhood film experiences, Bambi often has a prominent place. The trauma is presumed to be caused by the scene in which Bambi’s mother dies (off-screen). But there are other traumatic elements: the large-scale invasion of the forest by (off-screen) hunters and an all-encompassing forest fire accidentally caused by humans. Thus, there are at least two levels of devastating destruction and loss in Bambi – of the mother who has taken care of Bambi, and of the forest (in turn a powerful instantiation of “Mother Nature”) that is all he has ever seen. Yet, these traumatic developments are mapped onto the seasonal cycle of growth, decline, death and rebirth, and the socio-biological processes of one generation giving rise to and making way for the next. The experience of traumatic destruction and loss is thus balanced by a deep sense of ecological persistence through eternal renewal. Drawing on a range of primary sources, on the existing scholarly literature about Disney’s Bambi and Felix Salten’s 1923 German-language novel on which the film is based and on philosophical publications, this chapter will examine the depiction of forest life in the two versions of this story: what kind of animal community is being imagined? What is the relationship between individuals, species and the forest ecosystem as a whole? How might the story’s fictional vision of nature and landscape relate to our real-world understanding of human and non-human life?
