‘Bambi’: The Disney movie Quentin Tarantino called “horrifying”
If anyone knows a thing or two about horror movies, then it’s certainly Quentin Tarantino. In reality, the Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill director knows most things about most movie genres, but he has previously detailed an admiration for horror cinema quite unlike any of his contemporaries.
Among Tarantino’s favourite horror films are those from the likes of Takashi Miike, John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper and William Friedkin. Tarantino himself has never made a direct horror movie per se, but many of his films tap into the tropes and motifs of horror, proving his love for admiration.
Interestingly, even shockingly perhaps, the film that had the most “horrifying” impact on Tarantino isn’t a horror movie at all, but rather a beloved animated film by Disney. While Tarantino has made his way through many of the most shocking pieces of cinema of all time, it was the 1942 film Bambi that left the deepest impression.
Discussing the film in his book Cinema Speculation, Tarantino said of Bambi, “Bambi getting lost from his mother, her being shot by the hunter, and that horrifying forest fire upset me like nothing else I saw in the movies.” In fact, it wasn’t until Tarantino saw Wes Craven’s 1972 rape/revenge film The Last House on the Left that “anything came close” to the horrors of Bambi.
Bambi tells the likes of the titular white-tailed deer, his parents and friends, including a rabbit called Thumper and a skunk called Flower. The film is famous for a heartbreaking scene in which Bambi loses his mother and eventually finds that she has been killed by hunters. According to Tarantino, Bambi is akin to Craven’s film that tells of the abduction, rape and torture of a teenager and the subsequent quest for revenge by her parents.
Tarantino admitted that the scenes from Bambi have been “fucking up children for decades.” Still, the director wanted to explain exactly why the Disney film affected him “so traumatically”. He began by pointing out that Bambi seeing his mother die “hits every kid right where they live”.
Going deeper, though, Tarantino explained that it was the sudden turn towards tragedy that makes such scenes in Bambi so harrowing. “The TV spots really didn’t emphasize the film’s true nature,” he said. “Instead, they concentrated on the cute Bambi and Thumper antics. Nothing prepared me for the harrowing turn of events to come.”
When Tarantino finally saw the traumatising scene of Bambi, he said his little brain screamed “the five-year-old version of ‘What the fuck is happening?’” Had the rest of Bambi been even remotely violent, then the young Tarantino might have been prepared for the harrowing scene in which Bambi loses his mother, but the fact that the first half of the film is most happy and playful meant that it came as a huge shock.
Indeed, Bambi is one of those films that introduces children to the concept of death for the first time, or as Tarantino puts it, it has been “fucking up children for decades”. Still, the director, in his typical hyperbolic manner, went some way to suggest that the film is as horrifying and traumatising as Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left, which, considering its content, was banned in the United Kingdom until 2002 and failed to be certified for release.
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