The magic of cinema lies in the classic sensations that are generated when sadness collide with joy. When the viewer sees it on the big screen, what in Ancient Greece, and in theatrical terms, was known as catharsis takes place. Since the beginning, Hollywood has played with those sensations to lift the child and adult out of their seats and make them smile and cry with emotion. Also Disney, whose signature bears tapes that have marked a before and after for this use of feelings. In recent years, remakes of classic films from this company have become popular. When they are to be carried out, discrepancies arise because some catharses are no longer conceived in the same way as others. And that same dilemma has knocked on the door of Bambi.
A former Disney screenwriter who was behind the new version of the mythical film starring the immortal fawn has revealed that one of the scenes that went down in the history of the original film should not be reworked because today’s parents are more “sensitive”. In fact, he has stressed that part of the modernization process of the 1942 classic was precisely to eliminate said scene. What is that part of the movie that no one is prepared to see today? Nothing more and nothing less than the death of Bambi’s mother; the movie scene that most traumatized the bloodiest director, Quentin Tarantino.
“Some parents and children are more sensitive than in the past”
As has been made known since backstage that illuminates Disney magicthe writer and film director Lindsey Anderson Beer had been working with an idea, a cinematic cornerstone, on which the entire process of the new live-action film revolved: bringing the story to the modern audience. And this, he considers, is incompatible with the presentation of said scene if, in addition, it is taken into account that the deer would enjoy much greater realism. The abandonment of cartoons for intensely perfectionist aesthetics seeks another way to explore a catharsis that they do not consider bad, but it is outside of what those families who sit in the cinema with a bucket of popcorn are looking for.
Anderson Beer explained it in a more direct way in an interview with Collider. “I don’t want to spoil the plot, but there is a treatment of the mother’s death that I think some children and some parents today are more sensitive about than in the past”he specified, to which he added that, perhaps, this is “one of the reasons why they have not shown it to their children” since “There is a whole generation of children who have never seen the original.”
However, she wanted to make this transition from a thought about the film that is deeply rooted within her. “What is interesting to me about Bambi is that it is absolutely a classic and it is a beautiful love poem, with a lot of art”he went deeper, to which he added the controversial ‘but’: “It’s a slightly different rhythm than what I think modern audiences are used to”. Finally, Anderson Beer had to abandon the project Bambi to take other cinematographic trains, such as his debut in directing a film, which he did in Pet Sematary: Bloodlines. The existence of this scene will remain a question that only time will resolve, depending on the direction in which the ethical and social winds blow on a catharsis that has always been the same.
