Disney’s Bambi Poster Mother and Baby Bambi!

Description

Bambi is a 1942 American animated drama film directed by David Hand (supervising a team of sequence directors), produced by Walt Disney and based on the book Bambi, A Life in the Woods by Austrian author Felix Salten. The film was released by RKO Radio Pictures on August 13, 1942, and is the fifth film in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series. The main characters are Bambi, a white-tailed deer, his parents (the Great Prince of the forest and his unnamed mother), his friends Thumper (a pink-nosed rabbit), and Flower (a skunk), and his childhood friend and future mate, Faline. For the movie, Disney took the liberty of changing Bambi’s species into a white-tailed deer from his original species of roe deer, since roe deer do not inhabit the United States, and the white-tailed deer is more familiar to Americans. Although the animators had animated deer in Snow White, they were animated, in the words of Eric Larson, “like big flower sacks”. Disney wanted the animals in Bambi to be more realistic and expressive than those in Snow White. He had Rico LeBrun, a painter of animals, come and lecture to the animators on the structure and movement of animals. The animators visited the Los Angeles Zoo and Disney set up a small zoo at the studio with animals such as rabbits, ducks, owls, and skunks, and a pair of fawns named Bambi and Faline so that the artists could see first-hand the movement of these animals. Rico LeBurn’s sketches depicted realistic animals, but as characters they lacked personality. Marc Davis created the final design of Bambi by incorporating LeBurn’s realistic study of deer anatomy but exaggerating the character’s face by making his proportions baby-like (short snout, big eyes, etc.). Although there were no humans in Bambi, live-action footage of humans was used for one scene: actress Jane Randolph and Ice Capades star Donna Atwood acted as live-action references for the scene where Bambi and Thumper are on the icy pond. The animators learned a lot about animals during the film’s production, giving them a broader spectrum of animation styles to use in future projects. The backgrounds for the film were inspired by the Eastern American woodlands. One of the earliest and best-known artists for the Disney studio, Maurice “Jake” Day, spent several weeks in the Vermont and Maine forests, sketching and photographing deer, fawns, and the surrounding wilderness areas. However his first sketches were too “busy” as the eye did not know where to focus. Tyrus Wong, a Chinese animator, showed Day some of his impressionistic paintings of a forest. Day liked the paintings and appointed him art director of the film. Wong’s backgrounds were revolutionary since they had more detail around the center and less around the edges, thus leading a viewer’s eye to the characters. Former Beatle Paul McCartney has credited the shooting death of Bambi’s mother for his initial interest in animal rights.

Near mint condition.