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Under the precious veneer of the Disney name lie some pretty damned spectacular pieces of motion picture art and Bambi is one of the best. With relatively little dialogue and an abundance of montage, Bambi plays out like a tone poem on rites of passage, death and rebirth. Many a child has been traumatized by Bambi, and rightly so. The death of Bambi’s mother remains one of the most dramatic moments in film history, executed with beautiful restraint — a gunshot, a drawn-out sequence where young Bambi searches in vain for her, and then that horrible line uttered by the Prince of the Forest: “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.” And that’s not the only frightening moment in Bambi (the frightened quail that gets her ass shot off sticks in my memory). The horrors of Bambi are balanced out by a lot of genuinely endearing moments, aided tremendously by some winning child voice-over performances and stunning animation. The sequence where a butterfly lands on Bambi’s tail is probably one of the most gorgeously rendered bits of character animation ever. Groundbreaking in its narrative approach, aesthetic realism, and technological achievement, Bambi is one of the greatest animated films of all time.

Oscar Nominations: Best Sound, Best Song (“Love is a Song”), Best Scoring