So I got Bambi for my girls today, as it’s out for the first time on DVD … One daughter is bored.
She watches Shark Tales daily, loves both Toy Story movies. Incredibles, Bugs Life, Shrek.
Maybe this is the problem, she’s been raised on computer generated graphics and doesn’t take well to the transition to “real” cartoon animation.
Either way, she’s bored out of her mind with Bambi.
And I can’t follow the damn story … o_O
Bambi? Of course she’s bored.
Disney animation ain’t all that.
Set 'em down in front of some Fleischer Bros. or Tex Avery if you want to give 'em a taste of proper classic animation.
No-one will be bored.
I have to second Larry’s opinion; the content of the cartoon matters infinitely more than the technology used to produce it (though I find crappy low-level Japanimation bites incredibly for being clunky and stupid). A few dynamite-down-your-pants scenes from any Tex Avery toon makes any Disney toon seem static by comparison.
Just make sure you get the original uncut versions. The butchered TV versions suck.
Or, it could just be that she doesn’t like the cartoon. No work of art in any medium is enjoyed by every single person who experiences it. There are even smart, educated people who dislike Shakespeare. It’s all subjective, in the end.
Bambi is a slow paced story with monotone imagery and not a lot of things going on. Kids who are used to fast paced action and flashy bright colours won’t really latch on to it.
Try Disney’s Sleeping Beauty or Alice in Wonderland instead.
At the time it was made, Bambi was admired as a technological masterpiece. But now overwhelming advances in technolgy have left it a relic. And once you subtract the technical achievement, the story in Bambi is thin.
I know I’m being a bitch about this, but Disney’s Alice In Wonderland is abominable. Really, really terrible.
Dumbo is pretty good, apart from the racial stereotypes and alcoholic humour. Uh, never mind. I guess Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are decent fair for little girls.
In a perfect world, though, all copies of Disney’s Alice would be buried thirty feet under all those Atari 2600 E.T. games. Ugh.
I agree, but it’s fast paced and colourful, and does have enough elements of the original story.
I’ve never seen a good translation of the book, actually. It always seems to get bogged down in plodding acting. It needs someone kind of like a more cheerful Tim Burton type to give it a whirl and really kick it into life.
Whoa now, let’s not be saying things we can’t take back.
Alice in Wonderland may be bad, but it has nothing on Atari 2600 E.T.
Guanolad – a Tim Burton Alice would be fantastic. Actually, one of the things that drives me up the wall about most Alice adaptations is that they make it seem as though Wonderland is supposed to be this fun, colourful place filled with whimsical characters that are amusing eccentrics. They never seem to touch on the darkness of the place. The inhabitants are merely zany, they’re crazy, and often quite ominous. (The sole exception to this being Czech animator Jan Svankmajer’s Alice, which just emphasizes the dark elements and tosses out all of Lewis Carrol’s clever language.)
Tim Burton would be a perfect choice to get the balance between amusing and a little frightening just right. (So far, he’s the only person I trust to adapt Roald Dahl, for the same reason.)
I think it’s worse, because kids that were exposed to the extreme suckiness of the E.T. game, in most cases, were already familiar with the movie and got all the good stuff that’s to be had out of it.
With Alice in Wonderland, it’s usually the other way around, these days. (And has been so for a while.) A lot of people walk away from the Disney Alice with the impression that they know the story – and that it’s sucky. Why would they be interested in the story after that? They know it’s pants.
It’s a crime against humanity, really. Literally. No hyperbole. I honestly put Disney in the same box with Adolf Eichmann because of that film. Okay, maybe that’s a little hyperbolic, but I still do my level best to dissuade folks from exposing young people to the Disney version before they’ve had the opportunity to soak up the original. If they’re too young for the real deal, start 'em on The Nursery Alice.
I don’t really like what Disney did with Pinocchio or Peter Pan, either, but those films at least are good fun for kids, have characterizations that are empathetic and entertaining enough that kids (even today’s kids) are liable to look upon them with favour, and while they gloss over certain elements in the originals, they don’t butcher them practically beyond recognition and introduce new elements that fall terribly flat.
Was it Bambi or Snow White that was the first use of Disney’s multi-field parallax camera? One of them was a technologically advanced and had breathtaking visual effects for its time. Equivalent technology produces the same effects (and better) for every episode of the Simpsons.
Also, Bambi is from back when Disney was making cartoons for children… now they make animated features for children and their parents. Kids may not get the jokes, but that added layer of sophistication might keep things more interesting.
One vote for Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland pwnz.
The scene where the carpet rolls out for her as she cries makes the movie for me.
And I don’t think Lewis Carrol was attempting to be particularly scary. He was presenting all the odd things in the adult world that Alice was about to enter into (time to sit at the table with the adults for tea) substituting in wacky animals just to show how silly some of the practices really were, like caucus races.
But really, I just can’t imagine the man sitting on the bank of a river in Cambridge (?) conversing with Alice Liddel and trying to scare her. …True that’s largely because I am not sure I trust what his intentions were…but still.
Hayao Miyazaki’s* Spirited Away was able to get Chihiro crying, but any scenes that seem like they should have been scary to children from an adults perspective probably just impressed the kids that they weren’t receiving vapid nothing for a change. No children in the audience were crying either time I saw it in Japan (and the movie was sold out every showing of every day for 2 months, gah. Personally I had thought Mononoke was better–but also targetted for older people so I guess it makes sense.)
It was Bambi. Compared to Snow White’s forest scenes, it’s a huge leap ahead. But it was really all just a testing ground for Fantasia, I think.
Not particularly scary – but there is a certain darkness in the books. My point is that the Caucus Race isn’t goofy fun. The humour comes from a dark place. Remember the Mouse who Alice meets (after nearly drowning in her own tears – tears she cried after her attempted recitation of an allegorical poem about a virtuous and industrious honeybee morphed into a gruesome parody about a crocodile gleefully eating smaller creatures) The one she keeps terrifying by mentioning how good Dinah is at catching mice? The one who recites a long poem to her about a mouse-killing Fury? “‘I’ll be the Judge, and I’ll be the Jury,’ said the cunning old Fury, ‘I’ll try the whole case and condemn you to death.’” Well, that just sets the tone, when Alice threatens all the members of the Caucus Race with the prospect of being eaten by Dinah. In practically every chapter after that, someone is threatened with death – and part of the humour is Alice’s blithe acceptance of the way things work there.
The Duchess who’s a child-abuser? Alice casually takes her baby away, because it’s plain to her that “they’re sure to kill it in a day or two.” And then she just shrugs it off when it turns into a pig (a fine pig!) and runs away into the woods.
Much later, Alice tries to recite The Voice of the Sluggard, another morally instructional verse, which (outside of Wonderland,) describes a wastrel, and concludes:
Again, it somehow comes out as something grisly in Wonderland:
The last line (which isn’t hard to work out) is interrupted by the Mock Turtle, who then recites a parody of Star of the Evening, which is about… …Mock Turtle Soup. He sobs uncontrollably through the whole thing, and no wonder…
His recital, of course, is in turn interrupted. By a trial. For pastry theft – a capital crime, of course. Every crime in Wonderland is a capital crime. Even appearing as a witness:
Alice In Wonderland is based on some very dark humour. It’s not meant to be scary – but adaptations that make Wonderland seem like a fun, silly place, where everybody is carefree and happy — miss the point, somewhat. In Wonderland, everyone is mad, and knows it. Everything that is intended to be uplifting and pure, when brought into it, is transmuted into something bestial and cruel.
Wonderland is, literally, a nightmare world --but Alice takes it in stride, so everything’s cool.
Jonathan Miller’s freaky 1966 version made for British teevee, starring Leo McKern, Peter Sellers, Michael Redgrave, Peter Cook, John Gielgud, Malcolm Muggeridge, Wilfrid Brambell, and a buncha guys who would later create Monty Python. Music by Ravi Shankar.
You want a dark Alice, you gotta get this!
Alright, I gotta stand up and defend Disney’s Alice. You show me another version that retains as much of Carroll’s comic verses, the sanme love of punnery and is entertaining as well. Seriously – watch it again and count how many of the poem parodies actually made it into the Duisney cartoon. It’s more than you think, and more than any other version I’ve seen.
The Fleischer studio did film Alice – or at least part of it. Thwey contributed a “Walrus and the Carpenter” to the Paramount Live-Action version. I’ll still take the Disney version (which also manages to recite an abridged version of the poem).
The Disney animators clearly took great delight in the visual humor of Alice’s size changes, much as Tenniel’s book illustrations did (and no other film version does). And the film is full of wordplay and punning that might not be directly from Carroll, but is certainly in his spirit:
Cheshire Cat: Can you stand on your head? (as he stands on his own separated noggin)
March Hare: (offering to the Hatter) Sugar?
Mad Hatter: Two Spoons
March Hare: Two Spoons! (jamming two spoons – and no sugar – into the White Rabbit’s watch)
Red Queen: Who painted my roses red?
One of Spades: It wasn’t me! The Two!
Red Queen: The Deuce, you say?
It was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). You can particularly see it during Snow White’s run through the forest.
Actually, that was the first Disney feature film to use the multi-plane camera. The first Disney cartoon to use it was the Oscar-winning short The Old Mill (1937), released a month earlier. The Motion Picture Academy also gave a Class II Scientific or Technical Award to Disney in 1938 for the invention of the multi-plane camera.
Alice doesn’t translate very well to film simply because it’s so episodic. Alice goes to Wonderland (and through the Looking Glass) and meets a strange character. Then she meets another. Then another. Then another. Then one of the earlier ones. It’s fine as a book, but once you start acting things out, the structure is boring. So you try to do something to give it a structure, and that’s very tricky.
The 1999 TV version managed this by creating a frame tale dealing with Alice’s fear of performing. Her trip to Wonderland gives her clues to overcome her stage fright, and they are added so quietly that you don’t realize it until the final scene.
Getting back to the OP, I agree that Bambi is pretty dull. Dumbo is by far a better film – probably the best of the classic Disneys.
[QUOTE=GuanoLad]
It was Bambi. Compared to Snow White’s forest scenes, it’s a huge leap ahead.
Well, thanks for clearing that up. :smack: