Sun, Feb 21, 1943: Bambi

"Sat night (last night) I took all my school to see the show 'Bambi' at Augusta.  Of course we didn't take all in our car, (there were three other cars went) but I payed all their ways.  We decided to get there before the first show started and it just happened that we all got there and sat to-gether in two rows of the balcony.  I think they were all pretty much thrilled.  Just think it was the first show the Houser children had ever seen but their folks let them go for some unbeknown reason."

--Letter from my grandmother, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Winfield, Kans., Sunday, February 21, 1943.

In creating the film Bambi, based on a 1926 novel by Austrian novelist Siegmund Salzmann, the Disney studio went to great lengths to portray the deer and other animals in a natural manner.  It hired a wildlife artist to teach the animators and established a small zoo in the studio, purchased footage of wildlife and went out to film its own.  Yet, the now iconic film lost money in its initial run in 1942.  According to one assessment, "critics and audiences alike were deeply unsettled by the picture's realism.  War-weary Americans, it seems, whose husbands and sons were dying in battle thousands of miles from home, wanted to escape from reality rather than confront it in their local theatres."  Disney also faced protest from hunters who saw it as portraying them poorly.  Yet, my grandmother and her grade-school students seemed not to have had any of those concerns.  They were “all pretty much thrilled.” (Sources: Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film [New Haven: Harvard University Press, 1999], 111-12; Daniela Ribitisch, "Bambi", in Philip C. DiMare, ed., Movies in American History: An Encyclopedia [ABC-CLIO, 2011], 24-25).