“Are you ridiculous? I would never do that,” he remembers saying, believing the story to be flimsy. Zipes, professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, knew only of the Disney Bambi when he was asked by Princeton to translate its 100th-anniversary edition. Even the species was altered: Bambi becomes a California mule deer rather than a European native roe. His 1942 film stripped the story of its political and historical roots, sanitising, beautifying and Americanising the tale to serve his own taste and audience. He either did not read Bambi as an anti-fascist parable, or chose to ignore that aspect. In the biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, Neal Gabler describes how Disney associated with a group of antisemitic members of the Motion Picture Alliance. Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images ‘Few first editions remain’ … a Nazi book burning in Berlin, around 1933. Salten and his wife, unsafe in Austria, fled following the German annexation in 1938, moving to Switzerland where the writer remained for the rest of his life. Because of this, few first editions of Bambi remain, despite it having been a bestseller. This was the Nazis’ interpretation too: in 1935, both of Salten’s Bambi novels were banned and burned by the Nazis, who viewed them as Jewish propaganda. So my interpretation – and a lot of other authors or critics have realised this – is that Bambi was really not about animals but about Jews or other minority groups.” “He was a very contradictory man,” says Zipes, adding that the author, who changed his name from Siegmund Salzmann in his teens to sound less Jewish, was “perfectly aware of what was happening to the Jews in pogroms. “It’s quite evident,” says Zipes, “that the shooting and the treatment of the animals are an allegory of the situation Jews found themselves in at that time.” While the moral of the Disney film might be that hunting animals is wrong, Salten’s message seems to be more that hunting humans is wrong. “How do we deal with our loneliness? How do we deal with life in a brutal situation?” Zipes’s translation reinstated the anthropomorphism found in the original, but softened in the first English translation in 1928, to show how Salten used his animal characters to make points about humankind. Salten’s ending has “a very deep meaning” says Jack Zipes, translator of Princeton University Press’s 2022 edition. But this stag then dies, leaving Bambi not surrounded by a happy family, as in Disney’s version, but completely alone. Bambi’s mother and his cousin Gobo (replaced by Thumper the rabbit in the film) are both slain, while Bambi is shot too, only to be saved by the stag implied to be his father. While the threat of being hunted is a memorable feature of the film – leading Stephen King to call it the first horror movie he ever saw – this danger looms much larger in Salten’s work. Timely … Love Island’s Molly-Mae Hague and baby Bambi. Salten was affronted, writing to his US publisher: “I beg you most urgently, quite apart from softenings, not to advertise my work as a children’s book or to launch it otherwise in such a way.” But Disney was not the first to market the deer’s plight as a children’s story: the 1939 English-language translation of Bambi’s Children, Salten’s sequel, toned down the violence and gore, to be more child-friendly. Bambi: A Life in the Woods initially appeared in 1922, as a serialisation in the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse, before being published as a book the following year. Perhaps the most crucial difference between Salten’s novel and Disney’s film, however, is that the former was aimed at adults. Faline – Bambi’s love interest and also, in the book, his cousin – appears in both, but she and Bambi are estranged by the end of the original, not living as a happy family as Disney has it. While Salten’s Bambi was far from the cutesy romantic hero of the Disney film, both versions see the eponymous fawn learning about the natural world, losing his (yes, his) mother after she is shot by a hunter, then growing into an adult. Forthcoming horror film Bambi: The Reckoning will recast the beloved fawn as a vicious killing machine
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |