He took his first steps on ice and fell over. He made friends with a rabbit and an owl and a skunk named Flower. And then the forest changed, and he had to find a way to carry on.
Disney's Bambi, released in 1942, remains one of the studio's most achingly beautiful films — a work of animation so attentive to the natural world that it still holds up as a visual achievement more than eighty years later. Based on Felix Salten's novel, it follows a young deer from his first tentative steps through the seasons of a life in the forest: friendship, wonder, first love, loss, and eventually the quiet strength that comes from having survived something that seemed unsurvivable.
It is also, famously, the film that introduced generations of children to grief in a way that nothing quite prepares you for. If you know, you know. If you don't, you will.
What endures beyond the sadness is the beauty — the watercolour backgrounds, the dawn light through the trees, the thunderstorm, the fire, and a young prince standing on the ridge with his father beside him at last.
Our Bambi collection brings together officially licensed gifts, figures, apparel and keepsakes for fans of the young prince of the forest and the world Felix Salten and Walt Disney built together.
He was very young, and very much alive.
