![]() The scale of shock Bambi springs on viewers has few rivals – the closest thing in Hollywood history is another out-of-nowhere killing, the shower scene in Psycho. No wonder so many adults instantly wince at the mention of the title (Stephen King traces his formative contact with horror back to it). Behold the woodland idyll, the loving bond between mother and fawn, all of it adorably brought to life by Disney artist Tyrus Wong – and then the hunter, the wide-eyed terror, the violence, the loss, utter abandonment in a cold world. However well we think we know Bambi, a re-watch can be useful purely as a reminder of its impossible brutality. The connection to the dark heart of Disney storytelling was to have been even more direct: an earlier version of the script took place in the wake of Miguel’s mother dying, a narrative device that might best be called the Full Bambi. In a film pitched at such young audiences, its visualisation brings a genuine shudder – death as we all fear it, a lonely plunge into an unknowable void. If the notion of an afterlife seems like sugaring the pill, bleak is the fate of the forgotten, vanishing into what Coco calls “the final death”. As Miguel discovers, the dead can only enjoy the next world while they remain in the memories of the living, the place of at least one character imperilled by a case of advancing dementia. Peer beneath the cowl of the Grim Reaper and you will surely find a pair of mouse ears.Ī tough lesson: Mufasa (left) meets his doom in The Lion Kingīut under the romp lurks something sombre. Just a few recent additions to the Disney graveyard would include the noble Mufasa, slain during The Lion King, poor Ellie Fredriksen passing on in the opening sequence of Up, and the royal couple whose drowning kickstarts Frozen. The hunter’s gunshot that left Bambi motherless rings out into the present day. For generations, children’s movies – and Disney movies most of all – have been breaking the very worst of bad news to the young, arriving under cover of a U certificate to reveal the random cruelty and finality of it all. Strange, too, that so many of the films he made said so much about death. ![]() ![]() ![]() He should, he insisted, be remembered only as he had been in life, a wish that takes on a certain poignancy given the world then spent half a century speculating about his place in a cryogenic freezer. Before he died in 1966, he would tell his daughter Diane he wanted no funeral at all. The whole subject of mortality appalled him. Where possible, he avoided attending them – if they proved inescapable, his mood would darken for hours afterwards. The housekeeper came in the next morning and pulled his mother and father out on the front lawn.ĭon said he believes Walt was "haunted" by the death of his beloved mum.Ī second, more practical, theory is that the parents need to be killed off to speed up the plot - as the films are normally only 80 or 90 minutes long.Walt Disney could not deal with funerals. According to Dan, Disney had the studio guys come over and fix the furnace, but when his mum and dad moved in, the furnace leaked and his mother died. He said that the infamous film producer bought his parents a house in the early 1940s - and tragedy struck. Hunters, stampedes and even pirates have killed off many a cartoon parent, almost always at the start of the film, and there's a tragic reason behind Walt Disney's decision to do this.Īccording to an interview given to Glamour, Disney producer Don Hahn revealed a heartbreaking story about Walt's own past, which explains the almost total absence of the mother figure in his movies. Viewers are perhaps still haunted by the deaths of Mufasa in Lion King or Bambi’s mum having grown up watching the movies and princesses Cinderella, Belle and Ariel were just some of the many characters who grew up without mothers. ![]() It turns out that there is a surprising reason as to why Disney heroes are almost always orphans. ![]()
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