Bambi’s Mother: Scene Analysis

Wednesday afternoon we were given a few words of advice by Shaun Clark, our course leader: ‘The next time you watch a sad movie, try and look at the camera angles, lighting, acting and framing, and critically think about why you find it sad.’

The death of Bambi’s mother is a scene that requires no introduction, but here I’m going to attempt to flex my weary animation analysis muscles and look at this two-minute long scene in depth.

The scene starts off with plenty of light, it’s clearly daytime. The level of light corresponds with the tenporarily happy mood of the two characters: the eponymous Bambi and his mother who chow down on some fresh grass after a long winter has left them famished. Both shown in close up here, looking content.

The good mood doesn’t last long, of course. There is a very, very slow zoom out from the two of them until the camera shows them in an extreme long shot – surrounding both of them is nothing more than a landscape of snow. It’s vast and the two of them are vulnerable. As the three note leitmotif starts to increase in volume we know what’s coming: they’re not alone. The scene is subtley darker – there are more shadows in the foreground and the deer are in the light. The audience immediately knows that something with malicious intent is watching them, and for a split second during this long shot Bambi’s mother’s head shoots up, looking at something off-camera.

What’s outside the frame is often just as important, if not sometimes moreso, as what’s inside it. The greatest trick of Bambi was that Man, the most feared enemy of all of the animals in the forest, is treated more as a concept than an individual; a supernatural, abstract, collective force that can’t be defeated in the traditional sense because Man is, in essence, the human race itself and all of its abuses towards the natural world.

In an extremely effective and subtle moment during her close-up, Bambi’s mother stares at something off-camera, to the right, and then turns her head to look directly at the audience for only a moment with that same apprehensive, almost accusatory stare.

Joel Gunz has this to say about the second-long stare on his blog:
‘There are several moments in the film when Man’s threatening presence occurs. Bambi and his mother stop and look around to their left, to their right, and straight at the “camera”. In those moments, it is as if they are looking straight at the audience — at me — and I feel the full impact of their inquiring, remonstrating gaze.’

In one second, the characters on the celluloid have immediately made the connection between the off-screen hunter and us. She looks at us as if we’re the one she’s scared of. Of course, real Bambis and their mothers are. The off-screen villain isn’t just a cartoon invention disconnected from the real world. It isn’t a caricature. The hunter about to pull the trigger could be anyone; any person in the audience. The simple act of walking into the woods and frightening the animals that live there or eating a venison burger makes us no different from whoever it is outside of that frame who’s about to kill Bambi’s mother.

An extreme long shot pictured above, from a high angle reveals the extend of just how vulnerable they are in this wide, snow-filled meadow, and how far they have to run to reach the thicket to safety. We know the threat is coming from behind them, and in the shot above they’re running away from out of the frame – as if we’re seeing this shot from the point of view of whoever is trying to kill them.

To create a frantic tension there are quick jump cuts from one shot to the other – a cut from the long shot to one of Bambi running towards the camera from a low angle, revealing Bambi’s mother behind him – we already know that she’s the most vulnerable as she runs into the frame just after he disappears. There are more quick cuts going from a close up of Bambi running, and another close up of his mother’s terrified face as she urges him to keep going without looking back, screaming for him to keep running.

We can take her last words to mean one of two things: to keep running without looking back because they need to get away quickly without distractions, or to not look back because something too horrible to be seen is going to happen.

The snow filling the screen could be either flurries kicked up by the deers’ pounding hooves or a bullet narrowly missing its target. Either way, the suspense reaches a climax. One interesting subtely is throughout this scene the camera seems to get closer and closer to the characters in between the sharp cuts. There is particular focus on Bambi’s mother in close up and medium shots as she runs behind Bambi. The terrifying music swells before sharply pausing as a thunderous gun shot rings out.

As the music abruptly stops, seemingly interuppted by the sound of a gunshot we see Bambi escape towards the shadows. We don’t realise quite yet that something is wrong. We don’t see Bambi’s mother follow him, and then there’s a cross fade and a few long shots of Bambi running through the woods, framed by the trees, into the familiar thicket where he and his mother have lived since his birth.

Of course, the audience only realises that something is very wrong when Bambi does. His back is to the camera, him looking towards the open space, anticipating his mother’s arrival as we do. The empathy comes from framing the scene from Bambi’s pov: looking out towards the light, thinking that his mother was behind him and should be here any minute. Significantly, the only light and negative space comes from the thicket’s entrance, with everything else in complete shadow.

Bambi searches for his missing mother as the snow falls and the scene goes dark, trees silhouetted in black and the only light seemingly coming from the snow where Bambi is, like a spotlight at his feet. Extreme long shots and cross fades accentuate the sense of loneliness, space and emptiness and the passing of time. We have no idea how long he’s searching for her, or what could have happened, but the cross fades and extreme long shots are in sharp contrast to the quick jump cuts and close ups we had only moments before; this is a slow but painful burn that’s creeping up on us.

The camera seems to be pulling away from Bambi with each cross fade, making him seem smaller and smaller and more helpless and isolated, the trees dwarfing him entirely and adding a sense that there might still be hidden danger on the loose. Snowfall, like rain, is often used during sad scenes as an allegory for tears. The snow seems to completely eclipse the screen at some points as we just hear Bambi’s voice trailing off, echoing into the woods as he repeats ‘Mother?’ over and over again.

Cross fade into a medium shot of Bambi and it would seem that something is up once again, as if the scene is going to have some kind of resolution. But we seem to be viewing Bambi, once again, from a high angle, as if something taller is watching and waiting for him. Bambi reacts in fright to something above him, we have no idea who or what it is until a jump cut and a quick zoom in on the obscured but discernable face of a stag.

His stoic, almost solemn demeanour would denote that Bambi has a good reason to fear him, and it looks as if he’s going to say something. Bambi is a film known for being almost silent, but in seven words of dialogue we feel as if a tonne of bricks has fallen on us.

As the stag speaks, there is pure silence. No music, no sound effects, just the quiet hiss and crackle of the old 35mm. Of course, the long silence that follows the seven heartbreaking words adds to the weight and significance of the scene. Up until now music has been an almost constant accompaniment to the movie, often a much more effective substitute for dialogue. We’ve had the jolly violins as Bambi and his mother find the grass, the rising three-note leitmotif to signify the impending hunters, dramatic strings as the deer flee and what could be appropriately described as the mournful ‘oooohhhh-oooooh’ of the choir and pained cello as Bambi searches for his mother in the woods.

Silence as Bambi’s jaw hangs open for a minute in shock, then closes his eyes and hangs his head, raising it back up to look sorrowfully at the stag as a single tear falls from his eye. While it is often said that Bambi’s reaction is barely a reaction at all and somewhat anticlimactic, it’s a beautifully understated reaction that rounds of the scene so well it wouldn’t work any other way. Full-on sobbing just wouldn’t compliment the tone of what we’ve seen thus far. If anything, it allows the audience to do most of the sobbing.

The mournful cello plays as the stag speaks three words that end the scene: ‘Come, my son.’ (As a child, I somehow remembered this line as ‘Come, let us go.’ That’s the Mandela Effect for you, I suppose.)

A subtle but significant detail as the scene fades out is Bambi following the stag, then briefly stopping and looking back, almost hopefully, clinging to the possibility that his mother might be alive and she might be behind him. Of course, for a brief moment, it appears that Bambi is looking directly at us – we as an audience seem to be just as much part of this film as he is, but it’s ambiguous as to whether those who are watching it are the villains or supporting characters. Unfortunately, some of us might be the former without realising it.

Bambi waits a little, holding out for hope, before his father momentarily stops, looks back at him, and Bambi hangs his head in grief, following his father as the scene fades out, leaving us with the silhouettes of two deer side by side in the snow and nothing else in the frame other than the snow beneath their feet – essentially a minimalist way of framing black silhouettes on white, becoming almost Lotte Reiniger-esque.

The scene (and the entire film) obviously owes far more to its beauty than just its camerawork and lighting, but its tiny subtleties in the film that add up to make an extraordinary, if not rather unsung and unappreciated experience. The staging is expert, much of the heartbreak coming from the fact that we don’t know Bambi’s mother is dead until those immortal words and that the only thing that signals her death is a single gunshot – the significance of which only becomes clear long after its happened. It relies very much on a kind of shock that doesn’t feel overbearing but packs enough punch for it to hurt. That there’s never a body, that we never see, only hear her die, and that Bambi thought she was behind him all along.

There’s no long parting speech from her to Bambi, just desperate screams and pleas for her son to run and not look back as she fights for her life before being taken away in an instant by an unseen being whose motivations and backstory are completely unknown and largely irrelevant, for that matter.

The death of Bambi’s mother is the scene that anyone who has or hasn’t seen Bambi remembers and talks about the most and for very good reason, but in a strange way nobody really knows why it has the effect that it does. Dissecting the scene and what makes it the scene that is it seems to only do so much, because like all unique and great films the effect it has on the audience and on time itself seems to almost defy the logic of film analysists and critics. Art cannot always be explained. Bambi was very much the first movie of its kind. While films such as The Lion King (1994) and The Land Before Time (1986) have attempted to emulate, imitate and ape the scene with varying success all of them seem to lack the subtleties that the original scene was so masterful at utilising and blending. That is not to say that the aforementioned films are not good, it is just only to say that a scene such as Bambi is extremely difficult to recapture – it’s effect on people back in 1942 even moreso.