Disney: Bambi II (2006)

The 2005 Platinum Edition DVD of Bambi that I got in order to see that film had a sneak peak at this upcoming follow-up to the film, which, at that time, was titled Bambi and the Great Prince of the Forest. I was interested in seeing it from the preview that was shown but at that point, I hadn't become aware of just how bad Disney's direct to video and DVD sequels could be. If I had experienced that at the time, I would have brushed this movie off immediately. I've mentioned Disney's direct to video sequels before. I feel that they're unnecessary, unwanted, cheap cash-ins on the name of the classic original. Save for the sequels to Aladdin and The Lion King, that is generally the case. However, in my humble opinion, Bambi II is another one of those rare exceptions to the rule. It does have flaws, don't get me wrong, but you do get a sense that the filmmakers' heart was in the right place and for the most part, it is a well made, sincere companion piece to the original.

I wish they had stuck with the original title instead of simply calling this movie Bambi II because this is not a sequel in the traditional sense but rather a new type of film called a "midquel." It begins with the aftermath of the death of Bambi's mother when he runs into his father, the Great Prince of the forest. The Great Prince takes Bambi back to his den and there, meets up with Friend Owl. The Great Prince asks him to find a doe that can raise Bambi but Friend Owl says that with food being scarce during the harshness of the winter, the does are barely able to care for themselves and he won't be able to find a foster mother for Bambi until spring. The Great Prince reluctantly agrees to look after Bambi until that time. As the winter draws to a close, the Great Prince tries to teach Bambi how to be a proper heir to the throne but is frustrated with his son's lack of progress. At the same time, Bambi tries to get his imposing father to warm up to him by impressing him and showing him that he can be a prince. Over time, the two of them do become close, as Bambi learns to be brave, to not fall for man's tricks, and how to "feel" the forest as the Great Prince is able to. But when Friend Owl manages to find a foster mother for Bambi after all, the Great Prince must chose whether to go along with his original intent or not.

The director of Bambi II is Brian Pimental and so far, this is his only directing credit. He's mainly a writer for the Disney studio, having written the story for Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, the actual screenplay for as as well as been a story supervisor on A Goofy Movie, a story supervisor on Tarzan, and additional story material on Brother Bear and Home on the Range (the latter of which isn't exactly a glowing sign of talent). He also did come up with the story for this film. He's been part of the animation department on an An American Tail and has done so at Disney for Oliver & Company, The Little Mermaid, Enchanted, and most recently, Rio, as well as having been part of the art department for Return to Neverland. So while this has so far been his only directing credit, I felt he did a capable job here for the most part.

The major complaint I always hear about Bambi II is that there's dialogue galore, unlike the more visual and fairly pantomime original. I found that it worked well in some aspects but other times, not so much. There are sections of this story that could have been done with less dialogue than there was. I will say that I thought that Alexander Gould, who had voiced Nemo in Finding Nemo, was quite good as the much more talkative and developed Bambi in this film. I like how the film opens with Bambi calling for his mother and running into the Great Prince as it happened in the original movie (although I wonder why they seemed to use Gould's voice there but when the Great Prince spoke, it was Fred Shields' voice from the original) and it does a good job at making you feel that you're back in the world of the original film. I, for one, really felt for Bambi in this film. He's just lost his mother and is now being looked after by his father, whom he's only met once before and is still an imposing figure to him. due to his father's uptight and kind of cold attitude, Bambi wonders if he really does care about him or if he's just looking after him because he has no choice. His lack of knowledge about how to be a prince really frustrates his father as well and eventually, he decides that he wants to show him that he can be a prince. You can see how happy he is when he first sees actual pride in his father's face after he makes a jump across a ridge that the Great Prince admits he didn't make until he was much older than Bambi. After that is when Bambi, after encouragement from Thumper, asks the Great Prince why he stands still in the middle of the forest so much and when he tells him about it being part of a prince's duties, a bond starts to form between them. It really is heartwarming to see the father and son become close to each other and even though Bambi's feelings are shattered for a brief section when he finds out that his father has been trying to find a foster mother for him, he is soon reassured that his father really does love him. Even before that, Bambi has learned that he must man up (so to speak) and when he's being taken to his new home, he sucks it in and attempts to be brave, although he does say a silent goodbye to his father. I felt that it meant that even if he and his father hadn't been reunited, Bambi, though initially depressed about the situation, would have been strong enough at that point that he would have been okay.

You also really feel for Bambi due to how much he misses his mother. It's clear at the beginning when he's taken to the den of his father and looks at him before he falls asleep, clearly shattered by the dark turn his life has taken. It's also painful for him to see Faline run to her own mother and nuzzle her. The scene that really punctuates it is this heart-tugging dream that Bambi has about his mother (voiced by Carolyn Hennesy). It's effectively touching because we saw how close Bambi was to his mother in the original and therefore, his telling her that he misses her so much is just heartbreaking. I liked the way she comforted him and reassured him that everything was going to be alright and when he asks her why she's no longer with him, she simply says, "Everything in the forest has its season. Where one thing falls, another grows. Maybe not what was there before, but something new and wonderful all the same" It's genuinely moving. The situation is made even sadder by what happens when Bambi wakes up, where he thinks he hears his mother's voice but it turns out to be a trick of man, namely a deer-call. That's what I like about this movie is that they decided not to sugarcoat that aspect of the story. It's after his father saves him from being shot by the hunter using that deer call that he realizes that he will never see his mother again. Bambi says to his father, "She's never coming back, is she?" After pausing for a bit, the Great Prince sadly says, "No." That's when Bambi knows that he must move on. It's a very sad scene but I think it does help build Bambi's character, both for the audience and for himself, and it reinforces the coming of age motif. I know I'm sounding really sentimental and mushy with this but it's how I feel about it.

As for the Great Prince, I do agree that they perhaps humanized him a bit too much here. In the original film, he was a silent, imposing figure who seemed to appear when you least expected it like a ghost. Here, I do think that they showed him and had him speak more than was necessary. With this story, they probably couldn't avoid showing him more but during instances such as when he tells Bambi that a prince does not, "Woo-hoo" and the like, they could have easily done that with little to no dialogue. They also could have kept his imposing factor up by not having him speak much to Bambi for the first part of the movie and only do so more when they start to become close. So, I do agree with those criticisms but on the whole, I felt that Patrick Stewart was a great choice to play him and I thought he did a capable job, giving the Great Prince a strength and dignity with his deep voice. I also thought the character was solid as well. Even though he's reluctant to be a parent to Bambi because, as he says, "Princes look after the herd, does look after the young", you can see that he does indeed love his son and knows that what has happened is hard for him. You also get a sense that he really did love Bambi's mother as well. (But, I did feel that they dropped the ball at the end when he shows Bambi where he met his mother. That was fine but it didn't make sense when he said that he was Bambi's age when he met her because in the original, Bambi's mother said that he had lived longer than any deer in the forest, suggesting that he was much older than her.) He's a bad-ass as well, beating up these hunting dogs that attack Bambi. He eventually does become close to his son, having fun with him as well as teaching him, and he begins to have second thoughts about sending him to a foster mother. He is hurt when Bambi is upset when he finds out about it but he resolves that what he's been doing is not a prince's duty. However, circumstance brings them even closer together and he does decide to raise Bambi himself. Some may not agree but I felt that this did match up with his appearance in the original film when Bambi had become an adult because by that point, Bambi wouldn't have needed him any more as a parent and it makes sense, to me anyway, that we would have simply tried to sternly encourage Bambi then because he was a buck now. Plus, you saw them together briefly at the very end of the original so they might still be very close off-camera. So, even though he wasn't as mysterious in this movie, I thought that the Great Prince was treated decently as a character here.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't like Thumper (voiced by Brendon Baerg) more here than in the original movie. I know he had been a very popular character before this movie but I didn't get why because there wasn't much to his personality in the original film. Here, he has a lot more scenes and is more of a character, being Bambi's best friend and trying to help him impress his father. A lot of people probably found him to be annoying and overly cutesy here but I just didn't. I will say that I didn't get why they put in that subplot of him being constantly followed and irritated by his sisters. It didn't bug me but it didn't go anywhere either. So, yes, I liked Thumper here. Sue me. However, I felt the other characters were only put in here just because they were in the original. Flower (voiced by Nicky Jones) has no purpose being here. He's still cute and loveable but the only noteworthy thing he does here is fart skunk gas. That is a problem I have with this movie. That was not necessary and really drags the movie down a notch in terms of respectability. Keith Ferguson was fine as the voice of Friend Owl but I don't think he kept the same spirit that Will Wright did. He gets the respectable part of the character down but doesn't come across as cranky or crotchety as Wright did. The character that does nothing at all is Faline (voiced by Andrea Bowen). In order to make it match up with the latter half of the original, they couldn't have her and Bambi become all that close but that's just my point. She shouldn't have been in here at all because she does absolutely nothing. Introduced here as an actual character is Ronno (voiced by Anthony Ghannam), a bullying young deer who, it turns out, will grow up to be that buck that Bambi has to battle for Faline in the latter part of the original movie. He didn't need to be here either because his rivalry with Bambi amounts to nothing more than a little scuffle before the climax of the movie. Also, I can't help but be slightly annoyed at the way they characterized him here. When he appears briefly in the original movie, he's an intimidating and ferocious buck. Here, they made him a bratty little punk who is actually a whiny mama's boy and a coward. Basically, he's like Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequels. As a result, the character suffers from the same problem: it's rather disconcerting to learn that an intensely menacing character started out as a whiny brat. Yes, they weren't trying to do a story about a good person turning evil like in the Star Wars prequels but it would have been better if they had, preferably, not included Ronno at all or at least given a hint of the menacing character he would become.

The section where the movie really suffers is when Thumper and Flower try to help Bambi to be brave so he can impress his father. It's funny, I said that I like Thumper more as a character in this movie but this very section where he's the most prevalent is by far one of the movie's weakest spots. It's much too cutesy and slapsticky. This is where Flower first farts skunk gas but this is also where the three of them try to work on growling back at whatever is scaring them and all Bambi can do is let out the baa-like noise that a deer generally makes. They walk through the forest in single-file, with Bambi making that noise, Thumper just going, "Roar!", and Flower going, "Rrrr!" and trying to act like a turtle because he says, "Turtles are so scary." There's also this running joke that develops here where they growl at two tadpoles in a pond and one of the tadpoles starts chasing and growling at the other. You even see them later when they've become frogs and they're still doing that. It's cute but it doesn't need to be here. That's when the three of them try to cross a log over a stream that's guarded by a grouchy porcupine (voiced by the director, Brian Pimental) and Bambi decides that this is his chance to show his father that he can be brave. It ends in disaster with Bambi being chased all over the log by the porcupine (who is characterized as the typical old grouch who doesn't like young whippersnappers trespassing on his property) and eventually get a bunch of spines in his rear end, which Thumper has to pull out later on (Thumper even says, "I ain't gonna lie to you, it ain't pretty" and I'll admit, I snickered at how he said that). This does eventually lead to Bambi jumping that large gap and impressing the Great Prince but the lead up to it could have been done so much better and in a more dignified way. For as much good things I've said about Thumper, it really wasn't necessary for him or Flower to be present here. They could have just had Bambi trying to figure out how to impress his father on his own. They could have left the porcupine in but have him be much more menacing and when Bambi gets injured by him, he has to pull them out by himself or better yet, have his father do so, which would have made Bambi jumping the gap an even bigger payoff since it happened after that humiliating scene. I know Disney would have been capable of that but because they wanted to market this movie to young kids who probably can't comprehend the maturity of the original, they didn't do it.

Another pointless scene in the movie happens before that section and is, in fact, one of the first big scenes. Bambi, Thumper, Flower, and the rest of the young forest animals go to see the groundhog since it's time for him to come out and decide whether winter is going to continue or not by seeing his shadow. This groundhog character is also voiced by Brian Pimental and he's another overtly silly character, terrified of seeing his shadow (why, in this context, he is terrified of his shadow is never explained) and when he doesn't see it, he happily announces that spring is here and he starts dancing around and singing Let's Sing a Gay Little Spring Song from the original. It doesn't last though because this is where we're introduced to Ronno, who scares the groundhog back into his burrow. That whole section makes me cringe because it's entirely unnecessary, far too cutesy, and that groundhog dancing around kind of craps on the realistic animal animation that Walt Disney had his animators strive so hard to accomplish in the original film. And not only could they have made Ronno a better character as I mentioned earlier but they also could have had a better way to introduce him. Really pointless scene.

Now it's time for me to start complimenting the movie again. As far as the look goes, it's absolutely gorgeous. Most of Disney's direct to video titles look really cheap and you can see the low budget but this genuinely looks like there was care put into it. It's a shame that hand-drawn animation has become so scarce in recent years because this movie is a testament as to how good it can look with today's technology. The colors are vibrant and beautiful and the film does look like it takes place in the same forest world that the original did. Some of the actual background paintings by Ty Wong from the original movie were scanned and used in the film along with the backgrounds that were created specifically for this movie using computer paint programs, so you get that same recognizable look and, like the original, it does feel like you're in nature. While the movie is perhaps a bit too sunny and you don't see that haze that the original had, the scenes that take in the snowy winter are atmospheric and do carry a feeling of downbeat dreariness in regards to what has happened to Bambi's life. The film even recycles those dramatic changes in color whenever an intense scene happens that occurred in the original. The character animation is also really good. Save for those embarrassing groundhog and porcupine characters, the realistic animal animation from the original is kept intact for this film. They do, however, take some minor liberties with it but again, none as bad as those aforementioned characters that the director voiced. Some may find that the characters are far too cutesy in their facial designs, especially Bambi and Thumper but I thought they were charming and looked great. The Great Prince himself looked really great, as strong as he was in the original, and the designs of the other characters do match up well. To sum up, Bambi II is a beautiful film to look at and its design is a nice compliment to the original.

Another aspect of the original that is treated with great respect is man. While man isn't as foreboding a force here as he was originally, he's still treated as such. They could have just gone balls out by actually showing man and even making some of the hunters ridiculous, comic relief characters (like the idiotic Don Knotts-esque dogcatcher in Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure, and I just shuddered while remembering him) but fortunately, they didn't. Man is still treated as a force rather than actual character. You still don't see the hunters, not even a shadow, and all that signals their presence is gunshots and a glint of light meant to be coming from the barrel of a rifle. There is weird thing that happens when Bambi is trapped in a field by a hunter. The light on Bambi suddenly gets really bright and I can't tell if that light is supposed to be a creation of man, such as headlights from a truck (deer in the headlights, yeah), or if it's meant to be for dramatic purposes. I'm going to lean towards the latter since those dramatic colors do occur when the Great Prince rescues Bambi from the hunting dogs. Either way, it's an interesting visual touch. I also like how they expanded on the concept of the hunters without going overboard. Ronno explains to Bambi and Faline that man has a stick that can make him sound like them; in other words, a deer call. They scoff at it but Bambi himself is lured into the field because he hears a voice that sounds like his mother saying, "I'm here" and "Hello?" That's actually fairly genius, characterizing how deer perceive artificial deer calls, and the way it sounds is quite eerie. You also see an old fashioned trap when Bambi's would-be foster mother tries to break up a fight between him and Ronno and she steps into a rope tied to a tree with a bell, meant to signal hunters. While not as creepy as the deer call, I thought that was done well too. Unfortunately, for all I've complimented this film's treatment of man, they did do some things wrong. Whenever the birds in the forest become aware of hunters' presence, they fly away while yelling, "Man! Man!" That wasn't necessary because in the original, it was much more effective for Bambi or the Great Prince to see these frightened birds flying around crazily from the treetops. They, and also, you, knew what they were scared of. Didn't need to say anything more. But the worst is the treatment of the hunting dogs. Those dogs still look ferocious but their ferocity is diminished considerably because they get mixed up in slapstick involving that porcupine and Flower passing gas right in one's face. Should not have done that.

The climax isn't much to write home about. All it is Bambi being chased by hunting dogs by a rocky hillside and, with the help Thumper and Flower as well as unwittingly from that porcupine, he manages to defeat them and he also succeeds in sending one falling off that cliff. I guess it's meant to be a precursor to Bambi fighting off the hunting dogs as an adult but it wasn't as intense or spectacular. Bambi also falls off the ledge and is apparently killed. You know he's not dead, of course, which does detract from any real drama they were trying to get out of this moment. Still, it is touching to see the Great Prince shed a silent tear for his son and after Bambi regains consciousness, they share a poignant moment. That was heartwarming, even if you knew it was coming. The actual ending for the movie does make up for that lackluster climax in my opinion. You see Bambi with his antlers starting to grow and he and his father visit the spot where the Great Prince first met Bambi's mother. I find it to be a nice, final moment to the movie and it sort of compliments the coming of age aspect of the original. Throughout this movie, you've seen Bambi come to terms with the death of his mother and by this point, it's clear that he'll always remember her but he has been able to move on, which fits in with how he is in the second half of the original.

The soundtrack to this movie is also well done. The songs, and save for that groundhog, the songs aren't sung by any of the actual characters but by omnipotent singers like in the original, do fit with the tone and story of the film. The opening and closing song There Is Life by Alison Krauss is really what this movie about, because it talks about coming out of the darkness of despair and moving on from the bad things that life throws at you, just as spring comes out of the harshness of winter. It's sort of a reassurance to Bambi himself that his life may seem dark and alone at the beginning of the movie but he's going to be alright, a song version of what his mother tells him in that dream sequence. It comes full circle when a brief reprise of it is played at the end with Bambi and his father visiting that special spot. The song Through Your Eyes by Martina McBride does compliment the bond between Bambi and the Great Prince and there's no secret as to what The Healing of a Heart by Anthony Callea symbolizes. So, the songs in this movie are great. As for the music score by Bruce Broughton, while I can't say I remember the melodies off the top of my head, I will say that they do their job very well and bring out the emotion for their specific scenes, like the sad scene that opens the film, the touching dream with Bambi's mother, the bonding scenes between Bambi and his father, and the funny scenes, even though I still the think the latter were unnecessary. Supposedly, there are also some instrumental reprises of songs from the original but the only one I caught was the most obvious: Let's Sing a Gay Little Spring Song. Not a bad score but not the most memorable either.

While Bambi II does have its fair share of flaws, mainly the overtly cutesy and slapstick scenes as well as perhaps demystifying the Great Prince a bit too much, I don't think there's any argument that it is one of the better direct to video sequels that Disney has ever produced. It does feel heartfelt and genuine for the most part, the characters are still likable, it's beautifully drawn and animated, the drama from the original is present, albeit nowhere near as hard-hitting, man is still treated as a force and not as an actual character, and Bambi growing close to his father as well as learning to move on from his mother's death is touching. If you avoided it because of the less than stellar reputation that Disney's direct to video sequels have, I'd say give it a watch. It may just surprise you.