Shit That Scared Matt Groening: No. 1 - The Forest Fire From Bambi

"1. Seeing Bambi when I was two years old, and during the forest fire scene thinking that the movie theater was burning down."
~ "49 Things That Frightened and Disturbed Me When I was a Kid", Matt Groening (Bart Simpson's Treehouse of Horror #1, 1995)

Note: Introductory STSMG post can be found here.

Bambi, Walt Disney's 1942 coming of age picture about a young deer learning about life through the rhythms and the cycles of nature, is an enduring classic that has enchanted audiences for generations, in addition to causing no end of childhood heartbreak (guys, I don't know if you know this, but Bambi's mother dies. Shocking, isn't it?). The film climaxes thrilling set-piece in which Bambi and his father must flee to safety from a raging forest fire started by human carelessness, and the above statement by Groening is a testament to both the power of the sequence and to the magic of the theatrical experience in general. For what could be more beautifully, hypnotically immersive/apocalyptic than the sensation that your own world was crashing down in flames along with Bambi's?

Bambi is fairly unique among Disney films in that it does not have a traditional villain. Ask around as to who is the villain in Bambi and many will tell you that it is the hunter who kills Bambi's mother. Ah, but who is he? We never do meet the wretched soul who's been destroying the gentle innocence of innumerable children since 1942; he (or maybe she?) has no corporeal presence within the film, being represented purely by gunshot and by the forest critters' nagging sense of dread (which is also true of the earlier sequence when Man Was In The Forest). Humans do not appear onscreen at all in Bambi, but their presence is conveyed with such terrifying power that Man becomes less a species than a force, embodying everything that is alien and threatening to the natural world. Paradoxically, we recognise ourselves as aligning with that very force, and yet we come, much like the deer, to fear it. This is the genius of the film, in how it consistently prompts us to reevaluate how we stand in relation to its setting. The forest fauna are anthropomorphised enough for us to identify with them, and yet their naturalistic character movements create a clear sense of otherness (the deer more so than the skunk and the rabbits, who provide a genial comic relief) that keeps us from ever feeling truly at ease in mingling among them. Take the aforementioned scene where Bambi's mother meets the bullet with her name on it (not a great analogy because she doesn't have one, though I digress). We start out by getting up close and personal with Bambi and his mother as they enjoy the promise of the coming spring in the form of fresh grass, only to cut abruptly to a long shot which reminds us of just how exposed these creatures are in their open white environs. This is accompanied by the unsettling feeling that we are no longer accompanying the deer, but observing them from a distance, calculating the right moment at which to strike. It is a rude reminder that we are in effect the villains of this particular world, and it is upon sensing our presence that Bambi's mother becomes agitated. When she and Bambi are forced run, we are once again find ourselves at their sides, in the bizarre position of fleeing from our own offscreen doppelgangers. As an experience, Bambi has a compelling duality, offering us the thrill of being simultaneously the hunter and the hunted, the threat and the threatened. We share with in the vulnerability of these characters, and yet we must also contend with the fact that we are are effectively intruders in their fragile world; we are frauds, peeking stealthily into a hidden domain that did not invite us, and for which our mere presence has a tendency to spell destruction. Who killed Bambi's mother and burned his forest to the ground? We all did. Because we're human beings, Mother Nature's unwanted bastard children, a force so toxic that whenever we're around each and every other living being in the vicinity had better start running for their lives. If there was ever a film intent on making you hate yourself for being human, it's Bambi.

Of course, Bambi is also a prime example of what many refer to, in highly derogatory terms, as the "Disneyfication" of nature; that is, the tendency to depict nature as benevolent and virtuous rather than amoral and chaotic (as Werner Herzog is at pains to remind you that it is). With the exception of a few select species eternally destined to be the villains of Disney animation, such as wolves and felines (apologies to all you cat lovers out there, but Walt Disney was sure as heck not one of you), animals in the Disneyverse tend to be cuddly, dew-eyed innocents, dating right back to Disney's original full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, where an assortment of friendly critters appear to give moral support to Snow White and later assist her in cleaning the dwarfs' home. It goes without saying that such depictions are prone to sentimentality and one of the first things that other animated media tends to go after when looking to subvert Disney convention (do you remember that cameo that Bambi and his father had in The Simpsons Movie? I've suddenly got that image in my head and I'm desperate to dislodge it). Recently, I was reading the book Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema by David Ingram*, which offers an analysis of Bambi in terms of how it relates to human perceptions of the wilderness and to schools of preservationist thought, noting that the Disney film endorses the view that nature exists in an inherent balance, which will be retained only so long as it is free from human interference. Says Ingram of Bambi, "Human beings bring only death and destruction to the pristine Eden inhabited by the benign and gentle wild animals" (p.19).

One thing that I will acknowledge is conspicuously absent from Bambi's depiction of a thriving ecosystem is predation of any kind, for the animals of Bambi's forest do not appear to hunt one another. We all know that, in reality, Friend Owl would have killed Thumper and Flower and scarfed them down whole, but here he acts as a benign mentor who dispenses pellets of wisdom, not half-digested animal bones (a characteristic implicit in his name, which in this context almost plays as a contradiction in terms). We see some malignant animals in the form of the hunting dogs who attack Bambi and Faline toward the end of the film, but these are foreign invaders under the command of Man. The forest's native residents interact with the air and geniality of the most impossibly friendly neighbourhood, the single exception being Ronno, a rival male with whom Bambi is forced to duel in order to prove himself worthy of Faline's affections. When left to its own devices, the forest exists in an almost exclusively harmonious bliss, the implication being that the forest is indeed Eden, representing nature in its most perfect and uncorrupted state. As with the story of Eden, it is human vice that brings the spectre of dread and destruction into the world. Which is not to say that nature in Bambi is depicted as an entirely benevolent force. Bambi does make room for the harsher side of nature, firstly in the whimsical April shower that swells into a violent storm and, more prominently, in Bambi's first experience of winter, which becomes an impediment to survival the instant the innocent novelty has worn off. It would also be inaccurate to suppose that there is no role for death within this Eden so long as Man is not around (although there is no killing) for the film's final images show a wordless farewell between Bambi and his father. The latter understands that his time has come and that he is obligated to step down and fade away now that a worthy successor has been established. Everything in the forest has its time and its place, and one of the greatest challenges Bambi faces is in mastering his resilience and his ability to cope with change; nature in Bambi is not static and change is inevitable, but it is constantly renewing itself and telling what is effectively the same narrative over and over. Man represents an intermittent disturbance to this cycle, yet Nature is ultimately shown to be more powerful than he, in its ability to regenerate and continue following the devastating forest fire (although Disney's film stops short of the revelation in Felix Salten's original novel, when Bambi happens across the remains of a human murder victim - yes, really - and realises that humans are as mortal and as vulnerable as any other species).

Ingram also looks at The Lion King, the 1994 offering that represented the commercial peak of Disney's so-called Renaissance era, and which might be seen as a conscious revisitation and "updating" of Bambi for the SEGA generation (that is, with the pop Broadway musical treatment and emphasis on celebrity voice-overs that were becoming increasingly prevalent in Hollywood animation at the time). Like Bambi, The Lion King is concerned with the cycles of nature and with the preservation of a natural order, recognised here under the banner of "The Circle of Life" (which also provides the hook for one of its pop Broadway tunes). The Lion King bookends itself in the exact same manner as Bambi, opening with a sunrise and a birth and closing with the dawn of a whole new generation, and echos many of the coming of age themes explored in Bambi - notably, the traumatic loss of a beloved parent. As such, it would be pertinent to consider how The Lion King accommodates its own visions of a non-human domain that emphasises nature as a cooperative force as opposed to one existing in a state of constant competition, and Man's special place within that equation.

The Lion King offers a greatly more anthropomorphic vision of the natural world than does Bambi, although unlike Bambi it does acknowledge the role of predation in the Circle of Life, which is necessitated by its principal characters being carnivores. Somewhat disingenuously, however, we never see our heroes hunt and kill, outside of a sequence in which Simba embraces an all-insect diet and devours a bug that is not granted the privilege of anthropomorphism. Nala, Simba's love interest, attacks and chases Pumbaa the warthog (in one of the few instances in which a lion character is permitted to exhibit their truly bestial nature) but her primal urges are forgotten the instant she runs into Simba and she is apparently not tempted to kill Pumbaa again on learning that he is an associate of Simba's. Upon finding the lost and unconscious Simba, Timon and Pumbaa briefly discuss the wisdom of taking in and raising a creature that will one day grow large enough to eat them, but are satisfied in their assumption that "he'll be on our side". There is no question whatsoever of Simba's basic instincts ever getting the better of him (this does come up, but is not explored all that extensively, in the Broadway musical). As far as the lions are concerned, the predatory drive exists not as a primal urge in the interests of facilitating one's own personal survival, but as a conscious means of upholding the basic order of being. This is explicitly raised during a sequence in which Mufasa attempts to explain to Simba the concept of the Circle of Life, and Simba suggests that the basic tenet of respecting all forms of life, from the crawling ant to the leaping antelope, is contradictory to the lions' status as antelope killers. Mufasa explains that, "When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass," a statement intended to emphasise the intrinsic equality and interdependency of all life which nevertheless has a tendency to rub some viewers the wrong way, given that the film's anthropomorphic view of animal hierarchy calls for the antelope (who, incidentally, are not given any kind of personality or characterisation) to be both the appreciative subjects and the literal food source of the lions. The lions are capable of withholding their predatory instincts whenever their sense of honour demands it, but when they do kill they do so conscientiously, and it is taken as a given that the prey animals will not begrudge the royals for thinning their herds, for they rescognise that their respective roles are mutually vital in enabling the regeneration of the Circle of Life that sustains them both (or perhaps the antelope secretly enjoy the thought of exacting revenge by munching on grasses growing from the remains of fallen royals).

Of course, the most egregious contradiction to Mufasa's teachings that "we are all connected in the great Circle of Life" occurs in the very same sequence, where it is made clear that Mufasa does not extend this sense of benevolence and interconnectivity to the hyenas, who are as foreign and unnatural to the Pridelands as those hunting dogs were to the forest in Bambi. If the hyenas have their place in the Circle of Life, it is firmly upon the outskirts, where they are denied the riches of the Pridelands and expected to live in perpetual poverty. When Scar the Usurper takes over as king, his first action is to allow the hyenas access to the Pridelands (albeit for entirely self-serving reasons), which constitutes such an extreme violation of the natural order that the land itself literally shrivels up and dies. Ingram accuses the film of "construct[ing] an ecological rhetoric of nature in order to naturalize specific power relationships: the Circle of Life conflates a Darwinian sense of "place"...with knowing one's place in a social hierarchy based on conservative notions of power and authority" (p.22). I can certainly agree that the decision to characterise Shenzi and Banzai, the film's only verbal hyenas, as African American and Latino respectively was particularly unfortunate and, at best, opens up the film's central themes to misinterpretation.

Hyenas may be undesirable in the Circle of Life, but the one creature who apparently doesn't factor in at all would be Bambi's old adversary, Man. Not only is The Lion King entirely devoid of human characters, there is no sense of human agency whatsoever in Simba's kingdom; these animals exist in a world in which Man seemingly has never set foot. Although there are certainly valid discussions to be had around the film's representation of an almost mythically untamed African wilderness and around Ingram's observation that "Nature exists in the film as a national park from which the Masai, the human inhabitants of the real Serengeti, are completely written out" (p.23), I think the absence of humans can be attributed to the fact that, for the purposes of this world, they do not exist. Unlike Bambi, The Lion King is not a Man vs Nature story, but a straight-up Aesopian allegory in which animal characters function as analogues for human constructs and archetypes. Hence, there is no role for humans in this world because the animals already fulfill all of their niches. Unlike the animals in Bambi, the characters in The Lion King also exhibit an awareness that they are part of not so much a great Circle of Life as a wider corporate landscape, and a strong sense of the Disney brand infuses the film in ways that it would not have in an earlier project such as Bambi, when Disney had yet to become such an all-encompassing cultural force - this is most apparent in one scene where Zazu and Scar display an inexplicable mutual awareness of a certain Disneyland attraction. Inevitably, at a time when the emphasis in Disney features was turning to snappy writing and those aforementioned celebrity voice-overs, The Lion King is a far, far wordier picture than is Bambi, and the script is replete with cultural references and analogies which logically speaking shouldn't translate into this particular setting (one example being when Timon asks Simba if he wants him to "dress in drag and do the hula" - that Timon should possess a concept of gender dress codes is frankly ludicrous in a world where the animals do not wear clothes in the first place, to say nothing of how he knows about a traditional dance from Polynesian culture). Man might not exist in The Lion King, but his greasy fingerprints can be glimpsed all over the film. Humanity's role in The Circle of Life, therefore, is neither as a part of the balance or as the debilitating disturbance witnessed in Bambi, but as a winking Man Behind The Curtain, intermittently jarring you out of the reality of the film in order to remind you how much you enjoy a silly cultural reference for a silly cultural reference's sake and urging you to visit Disneyland and indulge your love/hate relationship with that infernal Small World ride. Ultimately, The Lion King is at ease with its humanity in a way that Bambi is characteristically not.

(Disney's third and all-too-typically forgotten animal-orientated ecopic, Brother Bear - which Ingram's book predates - appears to struggle on how to accommodate its ursine protagonists' predatory urges with this underlying longing for a unified nature, which is necessary to provide contrast with its human lead's cynical assumptions about how the world works. On the one hand, the non-bear animals are clearly shown to be afraid of the bears, and yet this fear is inexplicably forgotten during a musical sequence in which Koda invites the other animals to accompany him to the salmon run. I don't get it either.)

Ingram singles out Bambi's climactic forest fire sequence as an example of how parts of the film can be seen as reflecting outdated attitudes toward conservation, namely the assumption that forest fires are inherently bad and to be actively opposed, which Ingram identifies as being in accordance with forestry polices of the 1940s but clashing with subsequent insights into the beneficial role that fire can also play in the regeneration of forest habitats. Hence, the fire at the end of the film need not necessarily represent the Apocalypse, but just another facet in nature's complicated means of perpetuating itself (a suggestion that I doubt would offer much consolation to Bambi and his friends as they contend with the immediacy of the peril). Of course, the purpose of the forest fire sequence is to emphasise the tremendous impact that human activity inevitably has upon the wider world, often without conscious consideration. The biggest irony of Bambi, as far as its depiction of animal-human relations is concerned, is that the greatest devastation Man brings to the forest happens not through intentional encroachment but by total accident, as it is from a poorly-extinguished campfire that the horrifying blaze originates. Disney's Bambi is denied the lesson afforded to Salten's Bambi about the fundamental mortality of Man, but our ultimate takeaway is that Man may be more weak and foolish than purely malignant, an enemy to himself as much as to the forest. It is only appropriate that we should find ourselves suffocating in an inferno of our own making; Bambi reminds us that we will be the agents in our own downfall if we are not conscientious in our dealings with the Earth.

The forest fire sequence from Bambi has remained so heavily ingrained in public consciousness over the years that the film's characters have enjoyed a periodic association with forest fire prevention efforts in the US. In 1944, Walt Disney approved the use of Bambi's likeness in a campaign orchestrated by the Cooperative Forest Fire Prevention program, although he would only license the character for a year, after which Bambi was replaced by an original character, Smokey Bear, who has remained synonymous with US fire prevention campaigns ever since. Bambi has, however, reappeared in subsequent campaigns alongside Smokey (including the PSA below), exploiting our equation of childhood innocence with the purity of the Disneyfied wilderness in order to awaken our appreciation of the forest and our tendencies toward care and preservation.

Does it frighten and disturb ME?

To this day, I have not had the pleasure of seeing Bambi on the big screen, so I can only envy the young Matt for his vividly traumatic experience. But dammit, I do love me some Bambi, and the forest fire sequence still ranks as one of the all-time greatest in theatrical animation. Every time I see it, I'm in awe at how dazzlingly, searingly intense it is. It truly does feel as it the entire world is going up in smoke.

Smokey The Bear, though? God, he's horrifying. Although I think that does actually help in driving home the graveness of his message. Be sure to extinguish that campfire properly, kids. You don't want to see Smokey get mad.

*Somewhat typically, Ingram's book contains no reference to the one film that I was really interested in reading some critical discourses on. So I may even have to write my own. If I do, then be warned that it won't be at all pretty.