Watched Bambi with the kid. Lovely film, two notes:
- Watching this movie when you remember what happens to the mother but little else is nerve-wracking. Kept hugging my son in preparation for a moment that kept not being yet.
- Man, "Bambi" walked so that "The Land Before Time" could run didn't it.
Not to set one above the other, they're two films doing different things and I think both do their thing very well, but the thing Bambi does is pastoral vignettes showing the cycle of life and TLBT clearly went "OK let's take EVERY BIT OF THAT but put it in a more traditional kid's adventure story"
The really unexpected bit there was how Bambi's fight with the hunting dogs becomes Little Foot's mother's fight with the T-rex. The absolute thorough inversion of it all.
I also have Thoughts on what this film says about gender roles in the social milieu it was made... but the ending threw me for a loop. First we have kids with mother, distant fathers. So far so 50s. But next gen, Thumper & Flower are the "featured parent"! Plot convenience, presumably... or?
Cute answer could be "next generation men are more involved than their fathers" but film is from 1942 so lol. Plot convenience is easy but they didn't do it with Bambi - he's a distant father. I'll go with: revealed contradiction. Stereotype is distant father but men's lived experience included kids
(ok so maybe they tracked how the different species involved do things tbf, but this just says how much leeway they had in any direction - it explains why Bambi is distant like his father was while Thumper had & is a present dad... but doesn't explain why Thumper's dad was offscreen)
It's probably just "plot convenience" tbh; Bambi is the main character who's prince of the forest but you want to show the deuteragonists in the epilog & including their mates would add complexity. I still like how it betrays a sense the "mother" role is one fathers can fill (if needed) w/ no issue.