Among the Disney films is perhaps the saddest one, which together with Dumbo made millions of children cry, the story of a very young fawn whose mother is killed:
Bambi
, the animated film by David Hand, inspired by the book by Felix Salten , which cost the American production company tears and blood.
Released in theaters on August 13, 1942
, therefore exactly
80 years old
ago, the work had a troubled gestation.
To suggest the idea of transposing Salten's book into film, according to some sources, it was even Thomas Mann who met Walt Disney during his trip to the United States in July 1935 where both received an honorary degree from Harvard University. same day.
Mann was an admirer of Salten's works, but it seems that he spoke of him to Walt Disney not only for artistic reasons.
Salten was living in poor economic conditions and the sale of the rights to the film adaptation of the novel would have helped him.
Happy birthday Bambi
After buying the royalties in 1937, Walt Disney entrusts screenwriters Perce Pearce and Larry Morey with the task of converting the novel into a movie script.
The work proceeded slowly because at the same time Disney had put into production Pinocchio and Fantasia which were started after Bambi, but they had a much faster production and managed to be concluded and distributed earlier.
The screenplay by Pearce and Morey is faithful to Salten's work, written for an adult audience and therefore full of dramatic moments, with the anthropomorphism of animals reduced to a minimum, an aspect that will also remain in the film.
Production of the film began in late 1939, after several weeks of surveys in the woods of Vermont and Maine, to photograph deer,
fawns and the natural areas where the film would be set.
So, after four years from the initial idea, the making of the film seemed to have started.
In the late spring of 1940, the animators who had worked on Bambi's pre-production were hired to animate him permanently, but the problems weren't over.
The making of Fantasia and Pinocchio had been particularly expensive and the box office receipts had not been rewarding, so the Disney studios had financial problems.
In the spring of 1941 it was explained to the animators that the costs of making Bambi were to be cut by half and this resulted in numerous cuts.
Then, the entry into the war of the USA further slowed down the work on the film that finally came out in American theaters in the early days of '
Bambi turns 80: the original trailer of the Disney masterpiece
The story, drawn by Milt Kahl and Frank Thomas, is that of the young fawn who must learn to fend for himself after the death of his mother and will spend his childhood and early adulthood together with his friends, the Thumper rabbit and the Flower skunk. .
Despite receiving unfavorable reviews for its first release, the film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in December 2011.
One curiosity among many is that in 1968, in the reduplicated Italian edition, Loretta Goggi gave the voice to the newborn fawn and puppy.
