Bambi at 100: The Surprisingly Dark Roots of the Beloved Children’s Classic
How Disney Turned an Edgy, Political Novel into a Sentimental Family Parable
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The Jewish holidays begin next week, and with them, the unofficial start to a fall filled with religious milestones. This particular fall, in 2022, brings with it another milestone with deep ties to religious persecution, though it's one that few are aware of.
In 1942, Walt Disney released a sweet, pastoral animated film that opens with a gathering of wild animals—a squirrel, a rabbit, a chipmunk—welcoming the birth of a prince. “Well, this is quite the occasion,” says a stately owl.
The occasion is the birth of Bambi, who will one day take over as Great Prince of the Forest, a title currently held by Bambi’s father, who protects against hunters. Bambi is mentored by a lively rabbit named Thumper and a skunk he calls Flower. The Disney film is not entirely sweet—Bambi’s mother dies offscreen—but it’s a far cry from the original source material, which has deep roots in the anti-Jewish winds blowing across Europe in the early 20th century.
Felix Salten
Bambi: A Lite in the Woods is a 1922 novel by Felix Salten. Born Siegmund Salzmann in Vienna in 1869, Salten, the son of a rabbi, changed his name to “unmark” himself as a Jew. A journalist and critic, as well as a lover of the outdoors, Salten used the animal kingdom in his book as something of a metaphor for the state of Jews in Europe at the time.
As PJ Grisar writes in this profile in the St. Louis Jewish Light,
In the book, the animals are constantly hunted. Bambi’s mother is not the only one to die violently; all manner of fauna are disemboweled by their neighbors in the forest or shot by the horrifying “Him” (humankind). The jays and magpies who greet Bambi’s birth are most conspicuous when alerting deer and pheasants to man’s encroachment. Bambi’s first lesson after learning to walk is how to approach an open meadow, where, at the slightest hint of danger, he must be prepared to dart back to the trees.
Jack Zipes, a scholar of folklore and the author of a new translation of The Original Bambi, published to mark the 100th anniversary of the novel, argues that Bambi is Jewish. (The original translation of Salten’s book into English was made by future spy Whitaker Chambers.)
As Zipes writes in his introduction, “Salten longed to be close to animals, whom he regarded as pure, honest, and decent creatures, unlike the people of the Viennese society in which he lived and worked. Salten’s novel is a brilliant and profound story of how minority groups throughout the world have been brutally treated.”
First edition of BAMBI (Photo by JOE KLAMAR/AFP via Getty Images)
Salten would later become an outspoken supporter of Jewish statehood and backer of Theoder Herzl, the father of modern, political Zionism. As Paul Reitter writes in “Bambi’s Jewish Roots,” published in the Jewish Review of Books, later critics found the sound of Jewish dialect in Salten’s work. As if to prove this connection, the Nazi regime in 1935 burned the book.
Some contemporary critics have disputed the idea that Salten viewed the book as a Jewish allegory, including Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker. But even her article is headlined, “‘Bambi’ Is Even Bleaker Than You Thought.”
Regardless of how far you want to take the story as a parable of anti-Semitism, everyone who's studied the matter agrees that the story is far more political—and far more subversive—than is commonly remembered. As Zipes says, the centenary of Salten’s work is an occasion to move beyond the sentimental simplification of the Disney movie and see Bambi for the political creature he was.
“If you read this novel and go back and look at the film it’s putrid,” Zipes writes. “My gesture as an academic is to set the record straight.”
As Bambi himself says, “Life is all about perspective.”
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Photo Credit: Disney movies