▲ 186 points
back
227 comments
Yes, Bambi is an utterly depressing story.
Most original material Disney adapted was bleakier and more grisly than the adaptation.
Most of the tales collected by brothers Grimm would today be horror stories. (Did you know that Cinderella's evil stepsisters had their toes and heels cut off so they could fit in the slippers? Or that the ravens pecked their eyes as punishment? Or that Maleficent ends up in a boiling cauldron full of vipers?)
I bet Disney would be able to adapt even something like "Requiem for a Dream" into a happy hero-coming-of-age story.
You lose a lot if the only version of these classics you've seen (or read, or heard) is Disney's sweet & shiny simulacra.
The Brothers Grimm already toned the horror down. Sleeping Beauty was based on a tale called Sun, Moon, and Talia [0] which has the prince having sex and impregnating her while she sleeps, and she only wakes up from her newborns sucking the splint out of her finger when she can’t find the breast.
Many children's stories of old had an entirely different moral sentiment than today.
They exposed children to the idea that the chaotic world is outside your ability to control, but you must live in it and navigate it to the extent you can nonetheless. This will not always end well for you, despite your best efforts.
In contrast, the message of modern fairy tales is that life has challenges, but they can all be overcome. If you are noble, persistent and hard working, you can achieve anything. Characters nearly always end up royalty or some variation of happily ever after.
Don't forget about Pinocchio, who in the original Italian children's book is tortured and hanged for being such a "bad boy" [0][1].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio#Fictional_character_...
1: https://slate.com/culture/2011/10/carlo-collodi-s-pinocchio-...
The part of the movie where all of the boys on Pleasure Island begin to turn into donkeys always freaked me out as a kid.
For Cinderella, the story also existed in an older version told by Perrault, which is way less bleak than Grimm's tale. Especially as the Disney adaptation is closer to Perrault's tale (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella#Cendrillon_ou_la_pe...)
I know Disney pretends that "Song of the South" never existed, but Joel Chandler Harris' "The Tales of Uncle Remus" etc., includes a few stories where the animals meet their ends. Disney passed on those tales of course (leaving them as well out of the Disney book that followed the film and included additional Harris tales).
Like the suggestion that "Bambi" is a parable, it has been also suggested that Brer Rabbit represents the slave of the Antebellum South surviving against the toothed and clawed Brer Fox and Brer Bear only by his wits (though in fact Brer Wolf meets his own end at the hands of Brer Rabbit's "wit" ... or boiling water in his specific case).
> (Did you know that Cinderella's evil stepsisters had their toes and heels cut off so they could fit in the slippers? Or that the ravens pecked their eyes as punishment? Or that Maleficent ends up in a boiling cauldron full of vipers?)
That's the variant I got told in my childhood (1980s West Germany). It always amuses me that these simple facts seem to be cruel and horrific to Americans.
Also, "Hänsel and Gretel" is a tale about parental abandonment, stranger danger, cannibalism, and burning old women alive, then forgiving said parental abandonment (but only after the kids bring back treasure).
And "Red Riding Hood" is essentially about sexual child abuse.
Trying to imagine the boiling cauldron full of vipers. Were they magical vipers that could live in boiling water? Would Maleficent really be able to feel any snake bites as she was being boiled alive? Huge plot hole. 17th century writers didn't think this through.
Children's songs are also often cruel. "Il etait un petit navire" tells the story of a young sailor about to be eaten because the ship ran out of food. "Sur le pont du Nord" tells the story of a brother and a sister who ran off to a ball without their parents' approval and die when the bridge collapses. "Il etait une bergere" tells the story of a young shepherd who kills her mischievous cat in anger. These are examples from French folklore, but I would be surprised if it was different in other cultures.
>"Requiem for a Dream"
Well, if we're thinking about the moral messages of some of these old tales, I've always thought Requiem could be a good movie to show tweens+ as a cautionary against drug abuse. If Disney threw in an evil witch selling smack, a few catchy songs, a handful of dead parents, and a handsome prince to kiss Harry's arm back to life then I bet they'd have... well, maybe not a hit. But it would be something, and I'd watch it.
That's why Germans refuse to refer to Disney movies by the names of the original Grimm stories.
Disney/Hollywood version is always Cinderella, and German that closely adheres to the original is called Aschenputtel. The same goes for Snowwhite and Schneewitchen, Sleeping Beauty and Dornröschen.
> Did you know that Cinderella's evil stepsisters had their toes and heels cut off
The Disney version of Cinderella is based on Charles Perraults version, which is significantly different. An Perrault is older than Grimm, although both are based on older traditions.
Many of the Grimm tales in their original form were also somewhat bizarre or surreal. I agree with you, but sometimes think the Disney versions were crafted as they were in part just to make sense as much as anything.
I think that Bambi is something of a war movie; look at the forest fire scene, there is fire everywhere, it must have been inspired by bombing raids during the battle of Britain. I wonder if some of the artists had first hand experience of these events.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQrqhdU99Ws
Also the father commands his son 'you must get up'; he acts like a commander.
I prefer the sequel, “Bambi Goes Crazy Ape Bonkers With His Drill and Sex”
I recall something Stanley Kubrick said about Bambi being traumatizing:
I saw Mary Poppins three times, because of my children, and I like Julie Andrews so much that I enjoyed seeing it three times. I thought it was a charming film. I wouldn’t want to make it, but … Children’s films are an area that should not just be left to the Disney Studios, who I don’t think really make very good children’s films. I’m talking about his cartoon features, which always seemed to me to have shocking and brutal elements in them that really upset children. I could never understand why they were thought to be so suitable. When Bambi’s mother dies this has got to be one of the most traumatic experiences a five-year-old could encounter. I think that there should be censorship for children on films of violence. I mean, if I didn’t know what Psycho was, and my children went to see it when they were six or seven, thinking they were going to see a mystery story, I would have been very angry, and I think they’d have been terribly upset. I don’t see how this would interfere with freedom of artistic expression. If films are overly violent or shocking, children under twelve should not be allowed to see them. I think that would be a very useful form of censorship.I think as adults we downplay how difficult first experiences can be, and so I don't think we get that the stories of loss and struggle in kids movies are speaking to them about real problems they either already have or will soon.
Miyazaki has for some people become an alternative to Disney, but his work is full of Dumbo and Bambi moments. The difference is that in his work, the girl (and it is almost always a girl protagonist) is often substantially responsible for saving themselves, by reasonable means. They are not rescued by a boy or by deux ex machina.
Even in My Neighbor Totoro, which is almost but not quite an exception to this rule, the youngest (who is a main character, but not the main character) is saved by a magic bus. However, the main character initiates this rescue by digging deep and calling on resources she might not have thought to exploit. She asks for help from the most powerful person she knows and she gets it. She has to ask, and the terms of the rescue are very defined. Nobody white-knights her, nobody swoops in and reads her mind.
But the main struggle in that story is not a lost child. It is Death. And this resolves itself rather than being resolved by the characters, not through a miracle, but by discovering that the children don't know the situation and have invented a story that is much scarier than reality. In the end most of their fears are unfounded, and while life won't be everything they hoped, it's going to be much better than their internal catastrophizing.
I think conflating violent or frightening scenes with tragic scenes is a mistake here.
As a young kid I watched Lion King and Land Before Time, which both feature dramatic depictions of the death of a parental figures, which both lead to kids fending for themselves. I don't remember being traumatized by this at all, and watched them repeatedly. As an adult I see the tragedy and it's kind of shocking, but I think as a kid it was just make-believe and I wasn't relating to the characters in that way. And obviously tons of other kids watched and loved these movies too.
On the other hand the more intense scenes from Indiana Jones were terrifying and burned deep into my brain.
Where's that quote from? Was it before or after he let his daughter help out on the set of A Clockwork Orange? [1] Her job was said to be cutting out the letters on the wall.
(Which was awesome, I thought, even though she turned out to be about as messed-up as his quote would suggest.)
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/StanleyKubrick/comments/7q86pu/10_y...
Don't know -- I saw The Shining when I was 11 or 12 and it freaked me out pretty badly but I don't think it left any scars. It's a lot scarier than Psycho at any rate which mostly holds up but seems incredibly tame today.
11-12 is different than 6-7 but besides some nightmares, I don't think seeing scary movies have a negative impact on kids.
I’ve grown watching „The Animals of Farthing Wood” (1993 cartoon).
It has episode showing family of mice struggling to survive and worried about future for their babies. In following episode we get shot of same mice family impaled on needles by birds going to eat them.
https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_EkpfJKfyX8WRKQnr7H...
Entire story is told around forest dying out and animals struggling to survive in it. It was once called „that animals cartoon that traumatised generations”.
I loved a cartoon growing up as a child, called Alfred J. Kwak [0], a Dutch / Japanese series about a duck and his adventures; I believe a lot of it is on youtube if you want.
The first two episodes are about two anthropomorphised ducks that meet, fall in love, move into a clog and have a spawn of babies, happily ever after until the whole family but Alfred get killed by a car. That was err. a pretty brutal thing for a four year old to see.
The show goes on to depict things like nazis, racism (waterfowl aren't real birds like us!), apartheid, classism, alcoholism, even transgenderism / gender fluidity (the stork Ollie), etc. In hindsight, it was A Lot, and most of it probably escaped me.
If we're talking about bleaker topics in older Disney works, I'll ask you to take a moment and consider the entire premise of _Dumbo_ (1939). Why are the other elephants scandalized by the baby elephant with the big ears, asking what Mr. Jumbo would think? Why did they mean, just a few moments earlier when they said elephants are "a proud race"? Why would they shun him, declaring that he is not one of their kind? ... What kind of elephant has big ears?
It wasn't the first horror film my children saw (they watched Jaws, Alien, and Stranger Things) but the most terrifying and traumatic experience they've seen was the shipwreck scene in the Black Stallion. If you want to frighten children, murder what they love while they watch: their parents and animals.
Coincidence both Bambi and the Black Stallion were written during or in the immediate aftermath of world wars?
For some reason I got my hands on George Orwell's "Animal Farm" at a very young age, as it looked like a kid's book. That's a fairly bleak book, for example when the pigs sell the draft horse to the glue factory, but only the goat (whose only friend is the horse) knows what's going on.
Watership Down is another good one, the character of the Black Rabbit of Inle (the Grim Reaper of rabbitkind) was memorable.
However I disagree with claims that these kind of works 'traumatize' young readers. It's just an introduction to life's realities - everyone has to die, nature is beautiful but also violent, and humans can be crueler to each other than any animal ever could. Kids aren't traumatized by reading, or by playing video games - if trauma occurs, it's due to things like war and poverty and neglect and abuse.
I've watched "Watership Down" as a child. It's one of my more vivid memories from back then to put it mildly.
My key takeaways:
1. This year, “Bambi: A Life in the Woods” has entered the public domain, and the Chambers version has been joined by a new one: “The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest” (Princeton), translated by Jack Zipes, with wonderful black-and-white illustrations by Alenka Sottler
2. 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 ever known children to be as frightened by supposedly scary grownup movies as they were by “Bambi.”
3. 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
4. With the old Prince’s prompting, Bambi concludes from this experience not that we humans are a danger even unto one another but, rather, that other animals are foolish for imagining that we are gods merely because we are powerful
5. It was adapted from “Bambi: A Life in the Woods,” a 1922 novel by the Austro-Hungarian writer and critic Felix Salten
6. What makes it such a startling source for a beloved children’s classic is ultimately not its violence or its sadness but its bleakness
7. The implicit moral is not so much that killing animals is wicked as that people are wicked and wild animals are innocent
8. Salten insisted that he wrote “Bambi” to educate naïve readers about nature as it really is: a place where life is always contingent on death, where starvation, competition, and predation are the norm
9. What purpose are scenes like that one serving in this book? Salten maintained that, despite his own affinity for hunting, he was trying to dissuade others from killing animals except when it was necessary for the health of a species or an ecosystem
10. What are we to make of this muddy, many-minded story? Zipes, in his introduction, blames some of the confusion on Chambers, contending that he mistranslated Salten, flattening both the political and the metaphysical dimensions of the work and paving the way for Disney to turn it into a children’s story
Other works of Felix Salten: https://www.locserendipity.com/TitleSearch.html?q=Salten
I made a browser extension called No Scary Parts that skips traumatic scenes on Disney+ while trying to hold together a cohesive plot. Mainly for young kids who enjoy the music and other scenes, but aren't ready for the full story yet.
https://thomaspark.co/projects/no-scary-parts/
Fantasia was easy. Managed to do The Lion King. Haven't been able to pull off Bambi yet...
I have just realized that I may not have seen the Bambi movie I thought I saw as a child, because I could swear I remember seeing some of the scenes this article claims never made it into the film. I remember the oak leaf conversation from somewhere, as well as some of the harsher scenes they said were cut from the Disney version. I wonder if I read the book and forgot about it.
As jarring as Bambi was as a child, as an adult, the opening to Pixar's "Up" is far more heart wrenching.
To me Bambi’s mom being killed is much milder than the death of Mufasa in The Lion King. In The Lion King you see the violence first hand and then the betrayal of a family member leading to a child’s self inflicted exile.
In Germany it is not uncommon, or it was not uncommon when i was a child, for parents to read horror stories to their children; Der Struwelpeter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter
Scared the living crap out of me, especially the story of Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug ("The Very Sad Tale with the Matches"): A girl plays with matches, accidentally ignites herself and burns to death.
It actually upsets me there aren't more harsh stories for kids.
I'm a huge One Piece fan (on of Japan's most popular manga and anime for the last 22 years). In the first season, one of the main characters has her adopted mother murdered right in front of her when she's like 7 years old.
And, if that's not bad enough, her town is taken over by thugs, she spends the next 10 years working on a plan to get rid of the thugs while basically being a slave to them. Only to have them discover and ruin her plan making all the sacrifies she made those 10 years in vain.
The show at a basic level is kind of silly and definitely for kids at some level but these heart wrenching moments are what made the show.
Unfortunately, 2-3 seasons later they started pulling their punches. Characters would sacrifice themselves (so heart strings tugged) and then a few episodes later they'd show up with a few bandages recovering.
Fortunately there's still been a few major un-pulled gut punches later in the series.
I grew up with this book. I absolutely loved it, and spent several years not thinking about it, until I remembered the chapter of the two leaves, which was my favorite chapter. I dug it up again and read it aloud to my wife. Just a wonderful book. I didn't really come away with half the interpretations that the author of this piece had, but that's okay. I didn't see it as an allegory for anything. I just loved how unromantic and poetic it was at the same time. I could analyze the book any which way, but the overall feeling it left me with is cohesive, strong, and original.
As for this piece, I wish he had gone more into the difference between the translations. That's how the piece started, and it ended with him simply saying the Chambers translation (the pre-existing one) is better. Didn't even include a comparison example.
Some of the tales from my childhood that I hold very dear to this day looked at really tough topics: death, solitude, betrayal. "Ronia, the Robber's Daughter", "Timm Thaler, or the Traded Laughter", "The Adventures of Sajo and her Beaver People" by Lindgren, Krüss, and Grey Owl are some that come to mind. Their authors were interesting, complicated people who had something to say about the world they lived in. Proponents of the coddling style of child rearing would probably declare them "traumatizing" and "inappropriate" for the 7- or 8-year old kid that I was when I read them. What turned out to be really traumatizing though was the real world, not these fairy tales — which ended up teaching me some pretty helpful lessons after all.
Ironic that the title of this post is now a sanitised version of the original in order to protect the sensitivities of the modern Hacker News readership.
Finding Nemo also has a sad beginning. And the beginning of Up is both sad and sobering. But none of those I see as traumatising. On the other hand, The little prince basically sells suicide to kids. And all the teachers always praise this book and force kids to read it while obviously the book is not written for children.
Live kids movies used to be pretty savage too. I showed my young kids Born Free and Old Yeller.
Well, in the first, lions eat some people in the first scene. In the second movie, the wild pigs attack is terrifying. Never mind the rabid animals.
They didn't want to see my recommendations after those two.
Bambi was actually a favorite of mine growing up, but The Princess Bride scared the living daylights out of me.
has anyone ever seen Saturday Night Live's take on Bambi ? With "The Rock" ?
One folklore story we grew up with as kids was as simple as,
you misbehave -> some stranger called “Bag man” will come take you in a big bag
I don’t remember ever being actually scared of it but remember it since ever my memory had formed.
This is the most insufferable thing I've ever read in my entire life. This reads like chocolate cake with chocolate icing drizzled in chocolate syrup for smug individuals to read from the backseat of a private car service. The amount of faux insights and pop politic buzzwords while ending this with questions of whether bambi is a parable for jewish existence is astonishing and I found myself wondering if this was a parody paper submitted to the New Yorker to trick an editor into publishing it.
Bambi meets Godzilla
The saddest part is that the greatest idea-thief of all is the one who extended the copyright term.
The same gruesome scene begins the Babar odyssey, though unlike Bambi, it’s all on the page.
yawn. too long and no pictures. it's no wonder no one here actually read it.
yaaaaaaaaawn
A lot of weird people in here basically arguing for goatse to be shown to children.
There’s no good reason to show children traumatic events. A lot of them do internalize it. Just because you didn’t doesn’t mean others won’t. This has little to do with bad parenting or other such things. Some children are just able to take what is in a film and vividly imagine it towards their own life or have too much sympathy.
HN obviously isn’t a great place to get advice about how to raise children from people who are known to be chronic over workers and absentee parents…