Video for Bambi Trailer

Bambi is a 1942 animated feature produced by Walt Disney and originally released to theatres by RKO Radio Pictures on August 13, 1942. The fifth animated feature in the Disney animated features canon, the film is based on the 1923 book Bambi, A Life in the Woods by Austrian author Felix Salten.

The main characters are Bambi, a white-tailed deer, his parents (the Great Prince of the forest and his unnamed mother), and his friends Thumper (a pink-nosed rabbit), Flower (a skunk), and his childhood friend and future mate, Faline. For the movie, Disney took the liberty of changing Bambi's species into a white-tailed deer from his original species of roe deer, since roe deer don't inhabit the United States, and the white-tailed deer is more familiar to Americans. This film received 3 Academy Award nominations for Best Sound, Best Song for "Love is a song" and Original Music Score.

In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "Ten top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Bambi was acknowledged as the third best film in the animation genre.

Although the film received good reviews, it was criticized as being inappropriate for children because of the death of Bambi's mother, as well as the scary violence of the hunting scenes, dog attacks, and the forest fire climax. During its original release, it did poorly at the box office. In 2006, a straight-to-VHS/DVD midqual titled Bambi II was released. It fills in the gap from just after Bambi's mother is killed and he follows his father into the forest.

The death of Bambi's mother is one of the most famous moments in American film history, a moment so upsetting to certain children that they were carried sobbing from the theater. For this reason, and also the horrific climactic hunting/forest fire sequence, many critics question whether Bambi is suitable for very young audiences. When Bambi was shown during the Christmas period in December 2006 on UK channel ITV 2, the death scene of Bambi's Mother and the Prince telling Bambi she was dead was deleted. It was nearly 40 years later before Disney again featured a parent's death in an animated movie (Tod's mother in The Fox and the Hound). The off-screen villain "man" has been placed #20 on AFI's List of Heroes and Villains. Former Beatle, Paul McCartney has credited the shooting death of Bambi's mother for his initial interest in animal rights.

The U.S. Secretary of the Interior has criticized the movie Bambi for propagating the idea that the best way to manage forest resources within the U.S. was to fight forest fires. The Secretary of the Interior points out that controlled burning is now recognized as more beneficial, and that forest animals, such as Bambi, simply move out of the way of forest fires and, in general, are not killed by them.[citation needed]

In 1942, the animated feature film Bambi was released. Soon after, Walt Disney allowed his characters to appear in fire prevention public service campaigns. However, Bambi was only loaned to the government for a year, so a new symbol was needed, leading to the creation of Smokey Bear.

In 2006,the Ad Council, in partnership with the United States Forest Service, started a series of Public Service Announcement ads that feature footage from Bambi and Bambi II for wildfire prevention. During the ads, as the Bambi footage is shown, the screen will momentarily fade into black with the text "Don't let our forests...become once upon a time", and usually (but not always) ending the ads with Bambi's line "Mother, what we gonna do today?" followed by Smokey Bear saying "Only you can prevent wildfires" as the Smokey logo is shown on the screen.

The ads air on various television networks, and the Ad Council has also put them on Youtube.

In June 2008, the American Film Institute revealed its "Ten top Ten"—the best ten films in ten "classic" American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Bambi was acknowledged as the third best film in the animation genre