In a forest filled with peril, nowhere does comic relief pop up in the form of Thumper the rabbit or Flower the skunk, as they did in the “Disneyfied” film. Because we insist on continuing our reckless pursuit of profit at all costs, it will only be a few short years before finally we destroy ourselves and the rest of the planet too.Īs true for the planet itself, the greatest danger to Bambi is posed by He, Man, an armed murderer who kills animals seemingly arbitrarily and usually from a distance, and his dogs, who have betrayed their fellow animals by enthusiastically helping Man hunt and kill. This broken relationship is now painfully obvious in the accelerating climate crisis, which looms ever more ominously every day. I’m neither a literary critic nor a historian, but the book, in my opinion, is a powerful tale of the destructive side of human nature and our despotic relationship to the environment. “Read in the original language and in its sociohistorical context, ‘Bambi’ is, if anything, dystopic and sobering”, Professor Zipes continues, “for it reveals the cutthroat manner in which powerless people are hunted and persecuted for sport.” introduced by Jack Zipes, and illustrated by Alenka Sottler (Princeton University Press 2022.) Princeton University Press 2022 Jacket for The Original Bambi: The Story of Life in the Forest by Felix Salten, translated and. This new translation comes with an informative and lengthy introduction by translator, Professor Zipes, where he writes that, in Bambi, Mr Salten created “a brilliant and profound story of how minority groups throughout the world have been brutally treated, even when they try to live peacefully in their own environment”. Although I didn’t count the precise number of times that the word “alone” appears in each chapter (yeah, I know: I should’ve - I could make a graph!), avid readers and book club members can now count for themselves the number of times this word appears in a newly published translation of this classic, The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest ( Princeton University Press, 2022: Amazon US / Amazon UK). This is plausible: According to my reading of the new translation, I can tell you that the word “alone” appears increasingly often as Bambi grows older. But the Nazis (never very astute readers), nevertheless decided that this novel was a compelling allegory for how Jews were treated in Europe under their rule, so they officially banned the book in 1935 and then publicly burned it after Hitler himself deemed it to be “the work of an undesirable”.Īccording to the new translation by Jack Zipes, a professor emeritus of German at University of Minnesota and a leading authority on fairy tales and folk literature, Bambi is a story of brutality, loss and, ultimately, loneliness. That is the message I got from my viewing of the film, and in fact, it was the murder of Bambi’s mother that outraged hunters across America and helped strengthen the Animal Rights movement.ĭespite the controversies that this somber novel inspired, it became popular in Germany, then in Austria, as soon as it was published, as well as in the United States a few years later (1928). Leaving the sociopolitical interpretations aside, Mr Salten said he wrote Bambi to as a plea for greater understanding of, and greater care for, the natural world, and as a realistic story about nature, where starvation, competition, and predation are normal. Considering this interpretation, it seems unlikely that this novel would be transformed into a poignant animated film for children by Walt Disney.īut many literary critics maintain that in the original novel, the death of Bambi’s mother is an essential part of the history of European Jews: it symbolized the heartrending separation of Jewish children from their parents as well as the destruction and loss of their comfortable pre-Holocaust lives as they fled Nazi persecution. Most people think it was a sociopolitical allegory that represents the author’s experiences with a childhood filled with anti-semitism, his premonition of the coming Nazi persecution of European Jews and the impending Holocaust.
In this novel, Mr Salten tells a powerful adult story that made me wonder what his bleak novel really meant (he never offered an explanation).
This coming-of-age story about a wild deer realistically depicts the primitive beauty of nature and the astounding cruelty of man. This film was an animated adaptation by Walt Disney based on the novel, Bambi: A Life in the Woods, written and published in German by Austrian journalist Felix Salten in 1922. Like most American children, I watched Walt Disney’s retelling of Bambi in one of the film’s frequent cinematic rereleases in the many decades after it originally premiered in 1942.
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