17 ms·

The original “Bambi”

186 points by Thevet 4y ago

TheRealNGenius 4y ago
yaaaaaaaaawn
Ralfp 4y ago
I’ve grown watching „The Animals of Farthing Wood” (1993 cartoon). It has episode showing family of mice struggling to survive and worried about future for their babies. In following episode we get shot of same mice family impaled on needles by birds going to eat them. https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_EkpfJKfyX8WRKQnr7HhlTAsIH3XsMyfZ.jpg https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_EkpfJKfyX8WRKQnr7H... Entire story is told around forest dying out and animals struggling to survive in it. It was once called „that animals cartoon that traumatised generations”.
- brobdingnagians 4y ago
  I've been split on this. On the one hand it is a bit unpleasant and can be traumatizing, and we tend to shy away from unpleasant things, but on the other hand lots of generations grew up on Grimm's Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and learned a bit about how difficult life can be and the consequences of moral failings or lack of hard work. It is important to prepare children for the fact that life is not all rainbows and unicorns, but still important to protect them from the depravity of the world so that childhood is pleasant and magical with healthy emotional development. I guess there is a right way to do it, and a wrong way to do it, and that's part of the complexity of life/the universe/everything.
  - sentrysapper 4y ago
    Life will give those hard lessons out for free - why build a curriculum for it?
    - christophilus 4y ago
      That seems to be a key reason for fairy tales and such things— gentle preparation for life. It’s better to be equipped before battle rather than being tossed into the fray wholly unawares.
      - watwut 4y ago
        Imo, key reason for fairy tales is that both adults and children want to have fun. I watch movies and read books to have fun. Some of what my kids watch is written with proper moral lessons in it, but plenty of it is pure fun or with anti-lessons. The people in the past had no youtube and no tv. They still wanted to have some fun.
    - easytiger 4y ago
      > Life will give those hard lessons out for free Does it?
      - bigDinosaur 4y ago
        Eventually. Other commenters have made note that you can coast for decades without encountering any though, so best be somewhat prepared by reading and listening to others.
      - simonh 4y ago
        In the world as it was when these stories were first told, yes.
        easytiger 4y ago
        I don't follow. Human history until recently was sustained largely by oral tradition and story telling; superseded by written story telling. What's the problem with telling stories that confer some wisdom or some sense of history or for fun? Many of these stories are embedded idiomatically in many languages? Let each parent decide at what age they should read Rapunzel, when they are ready.
  - circlefavshape 4y ago
    > learned a bit about how difficult life can be and the consequences of moral failings or lack of hard work I don't remember anything about consequences of moral failings in the old fairy tales, just random violence and chaos. In Sleeping Beauty the prince's mother turns out to be an ogre who tries to eat Beauty's children, but luckily the prince returns in time and kills her. Where's the moral lesson there? Don't move in with your mother-in-law?
    - kstenerud 4y ago
      The same thing most poor kids learn growing up: Just because someone looks and speaks nicely or is nice to you doesn't tell you anything meaningful about them. And it can be a fatal mistake to not be careful. The old stories were designed to help prepare children for the hostile world they lived in.
    - dijit 4y ago
      > Where's the moral lesson there? The moral of the story is that monsters live deep inside even the people we trust most.
    - ineedasername 4y ago
      Well, off the top of my head from Grimm: --Cinderella: mean deceptive people might get their feat chopped off & eyes pecked out. (In short, Karma. though unfortunately the world doesn't quite work that way, but there's still a bit of "the world can be ugly" too) --Cat & The Mouse: Never forget that the nature of a predator is predation --Hansel & Gretel: Don't take candy from strangers. Also, if something looks to good to be true, it probably is. And also that maybe little children are delicious? I mean, the witch had to have her reasons. --Rumpelstiltskin: Okay, there's some mixed messages here. Lying father, malicious greedy king, deceptive girl... Rumpelstiltskin comes out looking like a hero, saving the girl's life 3 times but then get's cheated out of his last payment & kills himself. But he also wanted her baby. She agreed, but still... anyway no one really comes off smelling of roses but Rumpelstiltskin is the only one dead. --The Peasant in Heaven: Truly good rich people are very rare --Snow White: Alright, maybe this one shouldn't on the list. Could be there's a lesson about jealousy in there, and also that maybe you should try the Heimlich maneuver on someone that keels over while eating, but in the end it kind of boils down to some fairly creepy borderline necrophilia.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    IIRC, many of the most popular fairy tales give happy endings by pure luck and happenstance. Catch a fish with a magic ring, etc…. The ones with moral lessons are too on-the-nose to be enjoyable.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      The most popular fairy tales also have been modified to be more kid friendly. Nobody saved Little Red Riding Hood. Sleeping Beauty wasn't kissed, she was raped in her sleep and gave birth; it was her child sucking the needle out of her finger that woke her up. These used to be more than just stories for kids, but modern fairy tales are rarely ever told to an adult audience anymore. For many fairy tales, the happy ending was added centuries after they spread.
      - stickfigure 4y ago
        Try looking on youtube for a version of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" that ends with the boy being properly eaten. They've all been changed to have narrow-escape happy endings, wholly destroying the point of the narrative.
        selimthegrim 4y ago
        One could argue that Abraham and his son was the original narrow escape happy ending
        fennecfoxen 4y ago
        One could argue that in the original, he didn't escape either. "The text bears no specific mark of being a polemic against child sacrifice." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Isaac#Possible_child_sacrifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Isaac#Possible_chil...
      - watwut 4y ago
        I think the popular mistake is to assume that every story in folklore collection must be for children and we must be able to derive some moral message out of it. This was time before TV and youtube. Adults told each other stories meant for adults and kids might or might not listen.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    I feel like part of the problem is the medium. I read a lot of books as a kid. And there were many stories that I had no problem reading, but I really struggled watching on screen, even if I already knew what happened. Lord of the Rings being an example that comes to mind.
  - watwut 4y ago
    I don't mind scary stories for children, especially when told by people who know those kids and can easily judge the effect. But, the generations growing up on that and them taking deep moral lessons from it point is overstated. They were collected or written and then popular collections of folklore in some part of last century. They are not exactly bible, many of those stories don't even have some kind of moral lesson in them.
    - bashmelek 4y ago
      This is something I wish was brought up more. It is almost a meme that “the originals were darker,” but really the famous tales of the Grimms and Perrault et al are just local snapshots of a living tradition of the common people telling stories. I suppose the focus on the older recorded versions is a reaction against Disney and modified versions of stories marketed to children (e.g. Lang perhaps). And to be clear, I think all these, including Disney, are important culturally and present fine variants of the stories. Still, I don’t want us to forget the others. Digging a little deeper, you find tons of variants of stories, and discover all sorts of new ones, hybrids, seemingly incomplete ones, different levels of embellishment, darker and lighter. And some do have morals, but a lot of them are just things happening. Some motifs just seem to stick. And folk tales were not primarily meant for children either—we tell kids campfire ghost stories all the time, and don’t think so much on what they teach. We just like them.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  > It was once called „that animals cartoon that traumatised generations”. Although I can imagine this being quite horrific, I also don't recall that this cartoon was all that upsetting me when I watched it as a child. Then again I grew up in the countryside so maybe it was less shocking to me because I already knew what nature was like. When it comes to animal cartoons I think Watership Down and The Plague Dogs were much worse experiences. Still, kind of makes me wonder what's up with the UK and depressing animal cartoons.
  - youngNed 4y ago
    > The Plague Dogs I think a LOT of UK school kids were truamatised by this, a lot of teachers, saw it thought 'oh, same author (Richard Adams) and director (Martin Rosen) as Watership Down, lets stick the kids in front of this while we do something else. Man, that film was harrowing.
  - DocTomoe 4y ago
    Watership Down is mostly traumatising as a cartoon. I've read the book last year, and it feels a lot more as a deeply mythologic piece than a psychedelic horror. It's essentially a shorter Lord of the Rings, with bunnies. Highly recommended. (Also, the recent Netflix adaption of the material is a lot closer to the source material than the 1980s-era cartoon).
  - mariodiana 4y ago
    I'm traumatized merely from reading the Wikipedia entry!
  - pram 4y ago
    The Plague Dogs is so unrelentingly bleak, few films have the spine to just be utterly hopeless. It's like a "children's" version of something like Threads or The Lighthouse lol
    - mrob 4y ago
      I recently read an interpretation of the ending that seems plausible and makes it slightly less bleak. Rot13 for spoilers: Va gur crahygvzngr fprar, lbh frr gur ohyyrgf fgevxr gur jngre, naq gura gur uryvpbcgre snqrf bhg. Guvf pbhyq vzcyl gung gurl uvg gurve gnetrgf naq erghearq gb onfr, juvpu zrnaf gur svany fprar vf fbzr xvaq bs nsgreyvsr, naq abg gur qbtf' qlvat qryhfvbaf nf gurl qebja nf V svefg nffhzrq. Gur zlgubybtvpny fprarf va Jngrefuvc Qbja ner n cerprqrag gb guvf xvaq bs guvat, fb vg qbrfa'g fbhaq haernfbanoyr.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I loved a cartoon growing up as a child, called Alfred J. Kwak [0], a Dutch / Japanese series about a duck and his adventures; I believe a lot of it is on youtube if you want. The first two episodes are about two anthropomorphised ducks that meet, fall in love, move into a clog and have a spawn of babies, happily ever after until the whole family but Alfred get killed by a car. That was err. a pretty brutal thing for a four year old to see. The show goes on to depict things like nazis, racism (waterfowl aren't real birds like us!), apartheid, classism, alcoholism, even transgenderism / gender fluidity (the stork Ollie), etc. In hindsight, it was A Lot, and most of it probably escaped me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_J._Kwak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_J._Kwak
  - 0des 4y ago
    According to Redwall: Raven > Crow > Rook > Magpie, in that order.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Never thought I'd say this, but I really need to rewatch Alfred J. Kwak. I remember it as "that weird duck show from my childhood"… It doesn't seem to be available on any streaming platforms, though.
    - bytehowl 4y ago
      There's a bunch of playlists on YT as mentioned in one of the other posts. Here's the first one that came up for me (AI upscaled, apparently): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSaUrah-p_nqNYjF3iM7CUFQKMoruDUV https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSaUrah-p_nqNYjF3iM7...
    - radicalbyte 4y ago
      I've watched pretty much every episode at least 50 times, my wife also watched it as a kid and got our oldest addicted to it. Fantastic cartoon, impressive how they handled facisme. Guess certain Dutch politicians either didn't see it or did and got inspired by Dolf. In related news, I've also seen every episode of True and Nijnje (90s, 00s and specials) a similar number of times for kid #2 and kid #3 :) I grew up in the UK so as a kid I was traumatised by Yellow Submarine, Tottie (dollhouse burns down killing everyone), Watership Down and the aforementioned Animals of Farthing Wood.
- david38 4y ago
  That bird is a shrike. Pretty rough for a cartoon.
- gonzo41 4y ago
  That's wild, and really heavy. I'm so glad I didn't see that when I was a kid.
davidkuennen 4y ago
I've watched "Watership Down" as a child. It's one of my more vivid memories from back then to put it mildly.
- hackeraccount 4y ago
  Or The Plague Dogs. I didn't read the book but saw the movie. Just a touch grim.
- kstenerud 4y ago
  Watership Down and the Secret of Nimh were my two favorite movies as a young child in the early 80s, followed closely by the Dark Crystal and maybe Aristocats and the Black Hole. Other movies of the time like the Rescuers and the Fox and the Hound and Labyrinth and such were a disappointment compared to these...
  - onei 4y ago
    I've been curious about the Dark Crystal - was it particularly groundbreaking when it came out? I watched it after watching the more recent Netflix series and found the story pretty dreary. Similarly, I've heard Tron was almost revolutionary by the standards of the day, but the CGI is almost comical to watch now.
    - kstenerud 4y ago
      Both were groundbreaking and revolutionary. They were very ambitious projects due to the technology limitations of the time, and crossed well into the "labour of love" realm, in the same vein as Pinnochio (for example the animated bubbles in the crashing waves).
    - mbreese 4y ago
      (Not the OP) I can’t say it was ground breaking, as I was a kid at the time, but it was one of the great movies of my childhood. I remember watching it many times over. I do remember the characters seeming less real, and I still knew they were puppets. But this was also the era of Sesame Street, so a movie by Jim Henson that had puppets was kinda normal. I think the fact that my parents talked about it so highly probably answers your question more — it was something adults appreciated. Ultimately, to me, the Dark Crystal wasn’t a great movie because I feel the story was there to service the technique, even if the technique was masterfully used. Maybe I was too young to fully appreciate it. Tron was much the same. At the time, you knew it wasn’t great, but it was still new. Like the targeting computer CGI for the Star Wars trench run, the effects weren’t great. Even at the time, it was a little spartan. But the effects moved the story, and worked well enough to not be a distraction (and you had never seen anything like it before). Tron was just as much about what it foretold as much as the CGI that was available at the time. But in contrast to the Dark Crystal, I liked the story behind Tron more. I would say that both were groundbreaking for how they pushed techniques of movie making forward. The world creation in both were amazing and they both set a new bar for future movies to meet.
senko 4y ago
Yes, Bambi is an utterly depressing story. Most original material Disney adapted was bleakier and more grisly than the adaptation. Most of the tales collected by brothers Grimm would today be horror stories. (Did you know that Cinderella's evil stepsisters had their toes and heels cut off so they could fit in the slippers? Or that the ravens pecked their eyes as punishment? Or that Maleficent ends up in a boiling cauldron full of vipers?) I bet Disney would be able to adapt even something like "Requiem for a Dream" into a happy hero-coming-of-age story. You lose a lot if the only version of these classics you've seen (or read, or heard) is Disney's sweet & shiny simulacra.
- derbOac 4y ago
  Many of the Grimm tales in their original form were also somewhat bizarre or surreal. I agree with you, but sometimes think the Disney versions were crafted as they were in part just to make sense as much as anything.
  - dc-programmer 4y ago
    The stories were probably much more coherent to the folks living in the cultures they were conceived. At least at an intuitive and visceral level. There’s a theory that Hansel and Grettel represents a cultural memory of a time of famine where children were abandoned, left to starve.
  - MichaelMoser123 4y ago
    not just them, look at "thousand and one nights", but not at an adaption, look at something close to the original, these used to be very cruel, also the old Russian folk tales used to be quite cruel. I think they all used to live in a very different reality, with people dying at an earlier age and much more often then they do now. Also infant mortality was much much higher in the olden days; it was a scary time, altogether. The olden days didn't have the luxury of clean water, antibiotics and food plenty. These are quite recent inventions...
- baud147258 4y ago
  For Cinderella, the story also existed in an older version told by Perrault, which is way less bleak than Grimm's tale. Especially as the Disney adaptation is closer to Perrault's tale (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella#Cendrillon_ou_la_petite_pantoufle_de_verre,_by_Perrault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella#Cendrillon_ou_la_pe...)
spanktheuser 4y ago
It wasn't the first horror film my children saw (they watched Jaws, Alien, and Stranger Things) but the most terrifying and traumatic experience they've seen was the shipwreck scene in the Black Stallion. If you want to frighten children, murder what they love while they watch: their parents and animals. Coincidence both Bambi and the Black Stallion were written during or in the immediate aftermath of world wars?
- masklinn 4y ago
  > Coincidence both Bambi and the Black Stallion were written during or in the immediate aftermath of world wars? Meh. Every generation has its angsts, and writers putting it down to paper. Watership down was written in the very late 60s / very early 70s.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Bambi was a movie for war kids who lost a parent (or both) in the war.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  One thing I've really noticed is that a lot of people - children and adults both - have no qualms about depictions of violence and murder of people in media, but they get really squeamish when it's (cute) animals. I wonder what causes that, is it just a kind of desensitization? Or a built-in kind of justice that bad people dying is fine but innocent animals isn't?
  - kumarsw 4y ago
    This is a pretty well-observed phenomenon that the relative sadness of humans and cute animals dying in movies and real life is (presumably) reversed. Someone had even coined a term for it - “dog-dying-in-movie sad.” I’m at a loss to explain why, but it feels like Peak Internet Discussion so hopefully someone here will feel like expanding on it.
    - 4y ago
fennecfoxen 4y ago
If we're talking about bleaker topics in older Disney works, I'll ask you to take a moment and consider the entire premise of _Dumbo_ (1939). Why are the other elephants scandalized by the baby elephant with the big ears, asking what Mr. Jumbo would think? Why did they mean, just a few moments earlier when they said elephants are "a proud race"? Why would they shun him, declaring that he is not one of their kind? ... What kind of elephant has big ears?
- ginko 4y ago
  >What kind of elephant has big ears? African elephants? But the original Jumbo[1] was also an African elephant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo
- chasd00 4y ago
  The tear jerking properties of the treatment of Dumbo’s mother doesn’t get enough attention. There really is no greater love than that of a mother for her child. / notice I said “greater” leaving space for an equal ie a father’s love
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    > There really is no greater love than that of a mother for her child. You don't really know the intensity and unconditionality of the love your own mother has/had for you until you have kids yourself and see how your wife loves your child. I always appreciated my mother, but I was only able to fully appreciate her after I had kids myself.
    - mberning 4y ago
      Totally agree. I go pretty far out of my way to make sure my mom gets plenty of time with her grandson, which she loves. It also burns my ass to hear my wife say “I couldn’t have imagined how much I would like being a mom”. Society and culture is so screwed up around children and raising a family.
      - 4y ago
rendall 4y ago
Bambi meets Godzilla https://youtu.be/8s3UogfAGg0 https://youtu.be/8s3UogfAGg0
chasd00 4y ago
To me Bambi’s mom being killed is much milder than the death of Mufasa in The Lion King. In The Lion King you see the violence first hand and then the betrayal of a family member leading to a child’s self inflicted exile.
- washadjeffmad 4y ago
  I resonated with the fear and pain of those moments of not knowing after the shot and subsequent feeling of loss in Bambi much more acutely than the dramatized witnessing of the fall in TLK. The conflict between Scar and Mufasa had a song and jaunty lead up, so the betrayal wasn't much of a surprise. The death of Bambi's mother felt senseless and shocking. What gain could her death have served her killer? Why did she have to die? Who would care for the innocent and vulnerable Bambi?
  - mrwh 4y ago
    Exactly! Why did she die? So someone could have a moment of pleasure, someone who then never gave her another thought.
sandGorgon 4y ago
has anyone ever seen Saturday Night Live's take on Bambi ? With "The Rock" ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFJz2IMUeDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFJz2IMUeDE
drakonka 4y ago
I have just realized that I may not have seen the Bambi movie I thought I saw as a child, because I could swear I remember seeing some of the scenes this article claims never made it into the film. I remember the oak leaf conversation from somewhere, as well as some of the harsher scenes they said were cut from the Disney version. I wonder if I read the book and forgot about it.
photochemsyn 4y ago
For some reason I got my hands on George Orwell's "Animal Farm" at a very young age, as it looked like a kid's book. That's a fairly bleak book, for example when the pigs sell the draft horse to the glue factory, but only the goat (whose only friend is the horse) knows what's going on. Watership Down is another good one, the character of the Black Rabbit of Inle (the Grim Reaper of rabbitkind) was memorable. However I disagree with claims that these kind of works 'traumatize' young readers. It's just an introduction to life's realities - everyone has to die, nature is beautiful but also violent, and humans can be crueler to each other than any animal ever could. Kids aren't traumatized by reading, or by playing video games - if trauma occurs, it's due to things like war and poverty and neglect and abuse.
- fsloth 4y ago
  I read the Animal Farm to my below K12 kids on one sitting and they were hooked. Kids needs scary stories in a safe environment. This will help them process these thoughts and prepare them for the inevitable trauma they will face at some point in their life. Animal Farm is also not a bleak read but also fun as you can do all the animal voices with their characteristic animal sounds.
  - TaupeRanger 4y ago
    Stories don't prepare kids for trauma, and I don't think there's any real evidence in support of that idea. I would wager a large sum that a child who has heard scary stories is not more likely to better handle, say, the loss of an immediate family member, than a child who has only heard happy stories about unicorns, rainbows, and friendly interactions.
    - r3trohack3r 4y ago
      Not commenting on whether you’re right or wrong, but that’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison there - nearly to the point of arguing in bad faith. A more apt comparison might be a story about urban war where the main character looses many immediate family members (and explores the grieving process against the backdrop of the war) - and how that would help a kid process the loss of an immediate family member.
geocrasher 4y ago
Bambi was actually a favorite of mine growing up, but The Princess Bride scared the living daylights out of me.
gumby 4y ago
The same gruesome scene begins the Babar odyssey, though unlike Bambi, it’s all on the page.
- earthboundkid 4y ago
  There's a Barbar cartoon (by Nelvana, which is Canadian, so now it's on YouTube because Canadian media companies haven't all been gobbled up yet), so your kids can have the horror of watching young Babar see the hunters attack his family. My 3YO loved it.
thomaspark 4y ago
I made a browser extension called No Scary Parts that skips traumatic scenes on Disney+ while trying to hold together a cohesive plot. Mainly for young kids who enjoy the music and other scenes, but aren't ready for the full story yet. https://thomaspark.co/projects/no-scary-parts/ https://thomaspark.co/projects/no-scary-parts/ Fantasia was easy. Managed to do The Lion King. Haven't been able to pull off Bambi yet...
- copperx 4y ago
  > Fantasia was easy You no need an extension for that one. As a kid, I tried to watch it multiple times and I always fell asleep. And I was a very patient kid.
  - micheljansen 4y ago
    “Night on bald mountain” with Czernobog and his creepy fire slave demon things gave me nightmares for months.
  - lostgame 4y ago
    That you never got to the ending is why you consider it child appropriate. :P
Johnny555 4y ago
As jarring as Bambi was as a child, as an adult, the opening to Pixar's "Up" is far more heart wrenching.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  A large fraction of Pixar's output includes scenes that prompt a small child to ask "Why are you crying mommy/daddy?"
dimensionc132 4y ago
In Germany it is not uncommon, or it was not uncommon when i was a child, for parents to read horror stories to their children; Der Struwelpeter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter Scared the living crap out of me, especially the story of Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug ("The Very Sad Tale with the Matches"): A girl plays with matches, accidentally ignites herself and burns to death.
boredumb 4y ago
This is the most insufferable thing I've ever read in my entire life. This reads like chocolate cake with chocolate icing drizzled in chocolate syrup for smug individuals to read from the backseat of a private car service. The amount of faux insights and pop politic buzzwords while ending this with questions of whether bambi is a parable for jewish existence is astonishing and I found myself wondering if this was a parody paper submitted to the New Yorker to trick an editor into publishing it.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Did you even read it or finish it? It explicitly makes the case it is NOT a parable for Jews, as it is often interpreted, but rather the human condition in general. From the article: "“Bambi” is not a parable about the plight of the Jews, but Salten sometimes regards the plight of the Jews as a parable about the human condition. The omnipresence and inevitability of danger, the need to act for oneself and seize control of one’s fate, the threat posed by intimates and strangers alike: this is Salten’s assessment of our existence." That was the case the author was building up to the entire time. To each their own, but I thought it was an incredibly well written article.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  welcome to the newyorker.
greggman3 4y ago
It actually upsets me there aren't more harsh stories for kids. I'm a huge One Piece fan (on of Japan's most popular manga and anime for the last 22 years). In the first season, one of the main characters has her adopted mother murdered right in front of her when she's like 7 years old. And, if that's not bad enough, her town is taken over by thugs, she spends the next 10 years working on a plan to get rid of the thugs while basically being a slave to them. Only to have them discover and ruin her plan making all the sacrifies she made those 10 years in vain. The show at a basic level is kind of silly and definitely for kids at some level but these heart wrenching moments are what made the show. Unfortunately, 2-3 seasons later they started pulling their punches. Characters would sacrifice themselves (so heart strings tugged) and then a few episodes later they'd show up with a few bandages recovering. Fortunately there's still been a few major un-pulled gut punches later in the series.
wara23arish 4y ago
One folklore story we grew up with as kids was as simple as, you misbehave -> some stranger called “Bag man” will come take you in a big bag I don’t remember ever being actually scared of it but remember it since ever my memory had formed.
- brewdad 4y ago
  Did you grow up in the Mob?
sbate1987 4y ago
[dead]
tehnub 4y ago
I recall something Stanley Kubrick said about Bambi being traumatizing: I saw Mary Poppins three times, because of my children, and I like Julie Andrews so much that I enjoyed seeing it three times. I thought it was a charming film. I wouldn’t want to make it, but … Children’s films are an area that should not just be left to the Disney Studios, who I don’t think really make very good children’s films. I’m talking about his cartoon features, which always seemed to me to have shocking and brutal elements in them that really upset children. I could never understand why they were thought to be so suitable. When Bambi’s mother dies this has got to be one of the most traumatic experiences a five-year-old could encounter. I think that there should be censorship for children on films of violence. I mean, if I didn’t know what Psycho was, and my children went to see it when they were six or seven, thinking they were going to see a mystery story, I would have been very angry, and I think they’d have been terribly upset. I don’t see how this would interfere with freedom of artistic expression. If films are overly violent or shocking, children under twelve should not be allowed to see them. I think that would be a very useful form of censorship.
- hinkley 4y ago
  I think as adults we downplay how difficult first experiences can be, and so I don't think we get that the stories of loss and struggle in kids movies are speaking to them about real problems they either already have or will soon. Miyazaki has for some people become an alternative to Disney, but his work is full of Dumbo and Bambi moments. The difference is that in his work, the girl (and it is almost always a girl protagonist) is often substantially responsible for saving themselves, by reasonable means. They are not rescued by a boy or by deux ex machina. Even in My Neighbor Totoro, which is almost but not quite an exception to this rule, the youngest (who is a main character, but not the main character) is saved by a magic bus. However, the main character initiates this rescue by digging deep and calling on resources she might not have thought to exploit. She asks for help from the most powerful person she knows and she gets it. She has to ask, and the terms of the rescue are very defined. Nobody white-knights her, nobody swoops in and reads her mind. But the main struggle in that story is not a lost child. It is Death. And this resolves itself rather than being resolved by the characters, not through a miracle, but by discovering that the children don't know the situation and have invented a story that is much scarier than reality. In the end most of their fears are unfounded, and while life won't be everything they hoped, it's going to be much better than their internal catastrophizing.
westcort 4y ago
My key takeaways: 1. This year, “Bambi: A Life in the Woods” has entered the public domain, and the Chambers version has been joined by a new one: “The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest” (Princeton), translated by Jack Zipes, with wonderful black-and-white illustrations by Alenka Sottler 2. Stephen King called “Bambi” the first horror movie he ever saw, and Pauline Kael, the longtime film critic for this magazine, claimed that she had ever known children to be as frightened by supposedly scary grownup movies as they were by “Bambi.” 3. The film in question is, of course, the 1942 Walt Disney classic “Bambi.” Perhaps more than any other movie made for children, it is remembered chiefly for its moments of terror: not only the killing of the hero’s mother but the forest fire that threatens all the main characters with annihilation 4. With the old Prince’s prompting, Bambi concludes from this experience not that we humans are a danger even unto one another but, rather, that other animals are foolish for imagining that we are gods merely because we are powerful 5. It was adapted from “Bambi: A Life in the Woods,” a 1922 novel by the Austro-Hungarian writer and critic Felix Salten 6. What makes it such a startling source for a beloved children’s classic is ultimately not its violence or its sadness but its bleakness 7. The implicit moral is not so much that killing animals is wicked as that people are wicked and wild animals are innocent 8. Salten insisted that he wrote “Bambi” to educate naïve readers about nature as it really is: a place where life is always contingent on death, where starvation, competition, and predation are the norm 9. What purpose are scenes like that one serving in this book? Salten maintained that, despite his own affinity for hunting, he was trying to dissuade others from killing animals except when it was necessary for the health of a species or an ecosystem 10. What are we to make of this muddy, many-minded story? Zipes, in his introduction, blames some of the confusion on Chambers, contending that he mistranslated Salten, flattening both the political and the metaphysical dimensions of the work and paving the way for Disney to turn it into a children’s story Other works of Felix Salten: https://www.locserendipity.com/TitleSearch.html?q=Salten https://www.locserendipity.com/TitleSearch.html?q=Salten
bradlys 4y ago
A lot of weird people in here basically arguing for goatse to be shown to children. There’s no good reason to show children traumatic events. A lot of them do internalize it. Just because you didn’t doesn’t mean others won’t. This has little to do with bad parenting or other such things. Some children are just able to take what is in a film and vividly imagine it towards their own life or have too much sympathy. HN obviously isn’t a great place to get advice about how to raise children from people who are known to be chronic over workers and absentee parents…
drno123 4y ago
Finding Nemo also has a sad beginning. And the beginning of Up is both sad and sobering. But none of those I see as traumatising. On the other hand, The little prince basically sells suicide to kids. And all the teachers always praise this book and force kids to read it while obviously the book is not written for children.
amelius 4y ago
The saddest part is that the greatest idea-thief of all is the one who extended the copyright term.
emmelaich 4y ago
Live kids movies used to be pretty savage too. I showed my young kids Born Free and Old Yeller. Well, in the first, lions eat some people in the first scene. In the second movie, the wild pigs attack is terrifying. Never mind the rabid animals. They didn't want to see my recommendations after those two.
TheRealNGenius 4y ago
yawn. too long and no pictures. it's no wonder no one here actually read it.
tunesmith 4y ago
I grew up with this book. I absolutely loved it, and spent several years not thinking about it, until I remembered the chapter of the two leaves, which was my favorite chapter. I dug it up again and read it aloud to my wife. Just a wonderful book. I didn't really come away with half the interpretations that the author of this piece had, but that's okay. I didn't see it as an allegory for anything. I just loved how unromantic and poetic it was at the same time. I could analyze the book any which way, but the overall feeling it left me with is cohesive, strong, and original. As for this piece, I wish he had gone more into the difference between the translations. That's how the piece started, and it ended with him simply saying the Chambers translation (the pre-existing one) is better. Didn't even include a comparison example.
hanoz 4y ago
Ironic that the title of this post is now a sanitised version of the original in order to protect the sensitivities of the modern Hacker News readership.
dynamic_sausage 4y ago
Some of the tales from my childhood that I hold very dear to this day looked at really tough topics: death, solitude, betrayal. "Ronia, the Robber's Daughter", "Timm Thaler, or the Traded Laughter", "The Adventures of Sajo and her Beaver People" by Lindgren, Krüss, and Grey Owl are some that come to mind. Their authors were interesting, complicated people who had something to say about the world they lived in. Proponents of the coddling style of child rearing would probably declare them "traumatizing" and "inappropriate" for the 7- or 8-year old kid that I was when I read them. What turned out to be really traumatizing though was the real world, not these fairy tales — which ended up teaching me some pretty helpful lessons after all.

186 points by Thevet 4y ago

yaaaaaaaaawn

I’ve grown watching „The Animals of Farthing Wood” (1993 cartoon). It has episode showing family of mice struggling to survive and worried about future for their babies. In following episode we get shot of same mice family impaled on needles by birds going to eat them. https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_EkpfJKfyX8WRKQnr7HhlTAsIH3XsMyfZ.jpg https://www.wykop.pl/cdn/c3201142/comment_EkpfJKfyX8WRKQnr7H... Entire story is told around forest dying out and animals struggling to survive in it. It was once called „that animals cartoon that traumatised generations”.

brobdingnagians 4y ago
I've been split on this. On the one hand it is a bit unpleasant and can be traumatizing, and we tend to shy away from unpleasant things, but on the other hand lots of generations grew up on Grimm's Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and learned a bit about how difficult life can be and the consequences of moral failings or lack of hard work. It is important to prepare children for the fact that life is not all rainbows and unicorns, but still important to protect them from the depravity of the world so that childhood is pleasant and magical with healthy emotional development. I guess there is a right way to do it, and a wrong way to do it, and that's part of the complexity of life/the universe/everything.
- sentrysapper 4y ago
  Life will give those hard lessons out for free - why build a curriculum for it?
  - christophilus 4y ago
    That seems to be a key reason for fairy tales and such things— gentle preparation for life. It’s better to be equipped before battle rather than being tossed into the fray wholly unawares.
    - watwut 4y ago
      Imo, key reason for fairy tales is that both adults and children want to have fun. I watch movies and read books to have fun. Some of what my kids watch is written with proper moral lessons in it, but plenty of it is pure fun or with anti-lessons. The people in the past had no youtube and no tv. They still wanted to have some fun.
  - easytiger 4y ago
    > Life will give those hard lessons out for free Does it?
    - bigDinosaur 4y ago
      Eventually. Other commenters have made note that you can coast for decades without encountering any though, so best be somewhat prepared by reading and listening to others.
    - simonh 4y ago
      In the world as it was when these stories were first told, yes.
      - easytiger 4y ago
        I don't follow. Human history until recently was sustained largely by oral tradition and story telling; superseded by written story telling. What's the problem with telling stories that confer some wisdom or some sense of history or for fun? Many of these stories are embedded idiomatically in many languages? Let each parent decide at what age they should read Rapunzel, when they are ready.
- circlefavshape 4y ago
  > learned a bit about how difficult life can be and the consequences of moral failings or lack of hard work I don't remember anything about consequences of moral failings in the old fairy tales, just random violence and chaos. In Sleeping Beauty the prince's mother turns out to be an ogre who tries to eat Beauty's children, but luckily the prince returns in time and kills her. Where's the moral lesson there? Don't move in with your mother-in-law?
  - kstenerud 4y ago
    The same thing most poor kids learn growing up: Just because someone looks and speaks nicely or is nice to you doesn't tell you anything meaningful about them. And it can be a fatal mistake to not be careful. The old stories were designed to help prepare children for the hostile world they lived in.
  - dijit 4y ago
    > Where's the moral lesson there? The moral of the story is that monsters live deep inside even the people we trust most.
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    Well, off the top of my head from Grimm: --Cinderella: mean deceptive people might get their feat chopped off & eyes pecked out. (In short, Karma. though unfortunately the world doesn't quite work that way, but there's still a bit of "the world can be ugly" too) --Cat & The Mouse: Never forget that the nature of a predator is predation --Hansel & Gretel: Don't take candy from strangers. Also, if something looks to good to be true, it probably is. And also that maybe little children are delicious? I mean, the witch had to have her reasons. --Rumpelstiltskin: Okay, there's some mixed messages here. Lying father, malicious greedy king, deceptive girl... Rumpelstiltskin comes out looking like a hero, saving the girl's life 3 times but then get's cheated out of his last payment & kills himself. But he also wanted her baby. She agreed, but still... anyway no one really comes off smelling of roses but Rumpelstiltskin is the only one dead. --The Peasant in Heaven: Truly good rich people are very rare --Snow White: Alright, maybe this one shouldn't on the list. Could be there's a lesson about jealousy in there, and also that maybe you should try the Heimlich maneuver on someone that keels over while eating, but in the end it kind of boils down to some fairly creepy borderline necrophilia.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  IIRC, many of the most popular fairy tales give happy endings by pure luck and happenstance. Catch a fish with a magic ring, etc…. The ones with moral lessons are too on-the-nose to be enjoyable.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    The most popular fairy tales also have been modified to be more kid friendly. Nobody saved Little Red Riding Hood. Sleeping Beauty wasn't kissed, she was raped in her sleep and gave birth; it was her child sucking the needle out of her finger that woke her up. These used to be more than just stories for kids, but modern fairy tales are rarely ever told to an adult audience anymore. For many fairy tales, the happy ending was added centuries after they spread.
    - stickfigure 4y ago
      Try looking on youtube for a version of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" that ends with the boy being properly eaten. They've all been changed to have narrow-escape happy endings, wholly destroying the point of the narrative.
      - selimthegrim 4y ago
        One could argue that Abraham and his son was the original narrow escape happy ending
        fennecfoxen 4y ago
        One could argue that in the original, he didn't escape either. "The text bears no specific mark of being a polemic against child sacrifice." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Isaac#Possible_child_sacrifice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_of_Isaac#Possible_chil...
    - watwut 4y ago
      I think the popular mistake is to assume that every story in folklore collection must be for children and we must be able to derive some moral message out of it. This was time before TV and youtube. Adults told each other stories meant for adults and kids might or might not listen.
- nicoburns 4y ago
  I feel like part of the problem is the medium. I read a lot of books as a kid. And there were many stories that I had no problem reading, but I really struggled watching on screen, even if I already knew what happened. Lord of the Rings being an example that comes to mind.
- watwut 4y ago
  I don't mind scary stories for children, especially when told by people who know those kids and can easily judge the effect. But, the generations growing up on that and them taking deep moral lessons from it point is overstated. They were collected or written and then popular collections of folklore in some part of last century. They are not exactly bible, many of those stories don't even have some kind of moral lesson in them.
  - bashmelek 4y ago
    This is something I wish was brought up more. It is almost a meme that “the originals were darker,” but really the famous tales of the Grimms and Perrault et al are just local snapshots of a living tradition of the common people telling stories. I suppose the focus on the older recorded versions is a reaction against Disney and modified versions of stories marketed to children (e.g. Lang perhaps). And to be clear, I think all these, including Disney, are important culturally and present fine variants of the stories. Still, I don’t want us to forget the others. Digging a little deeper, you find tons of variants of stories, and discover all sorts of new ones, hybrids, seemingly incomplete ones, different levels of embellishment, darker and lighter. And some do have morals, but a lot of them are just things happening. Some motifs just seem to stick. And folk tales were not primarily meant for children either—we tell kids campfire ghost stories all the time, and don’t think so much on what they teach. We just like them.
vanderZwan 4y ago
> It was once called „that animals cartoon that traumatised generations”. Although I can imagine this being quite horrific, I also don't recall that this cartoon was all that upsetting me when I watched it as a child. Then again I grew up in the countryside so maybe it was less shocking to me because I already knew what nature was like. When it comes to animal cartoons I think Watership Down and The Plague Dogs were much worse experiences. Still, kind of makes me wonder what's up with the UK and depressing animal cartoons.
- youngNed 4y ago
  > The Plague Dogs I think a LOT of UK school kids were truamatised by this, a lot of teachers, saw it thought 'oh, same author (Richard Adams) and director (Martin Rosen) as Watership Down, lets stick the kids in front of this while we do something else. Man, that film was harrowing.
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  Watership Down is mostly traumatising as a cartoon. I've read the book last year, and it feels a lot more as a deeply mythologic piece than a psychedelic horror. It's essentially a shorter Lord of the Rings, with bunnies. Highly recommended. (Also, the recent Netflix adaption of the material is a lot closer to the source material than the 1980s-era cartoon).
- mariodiana 4y ago
  I'm traumatized merely from reading the Wikipedia entry!
- pram 4y ago
  The Plague Dogs is so unrelentingly bleak, few films have the spine to just be utterly hopeless. It's like a "children's" version of something like Threads or The Lighthouse lol
  - mrob 4y ago
    I recently read an interpretation of the ending that seems plausible and makes it slightly less bleak. Rot13 for spoilers: Va gur crahygvzngr fprar, lbh frr gur ohyyrgf fgevxr gur jngre, naq gura gur uryvpbcgre snqrf bhg. Guvf pbhyq vzcyl gung gurl uvg gurve gnetrgf naq erghearq gb onfr, juvpu zrnaf gur svany fprar vf fbzr xvaq bs nsgreyvsr, naq abg gur qbtf' qlvat qryhfvbaf nf gurl qebja nf V svefg nffhzrq. Gur zlgubybtvpny fprarf va Jngrefuvc Qbja ner n cerprqrag gb guvf xvaq bs guvat, fb vg qbrfa'g fbhaq haernfbanoyr.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I loved a cartoon growing up as a child, called Alfred J. Kwak [0], a Dutch / Japanese series about a duck and his adventures; I believe a lot of it is on youtube if you want. The first two episodes are about two anthropomorphised ducks that meet, fall in love, move into a clog and have a spawn of babies, happily ever after until the whole family but Alfred get killed by a car. That was err. a pretty brutal thing for a four year old to see. The show goes on to depict things like nazis, racism (waterfowl aren't real birds like us!), apartheid, classism, alcoholism, even transgenderism / gender fluidity (the stork Ollie), etc. In hindsight, it was A Lot, and most of it probably escaped me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_J._Kwak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_J._Kwak
- 0des 4y ago
  According to Redwall: Raven > Crow > Rook > Magpie, in that order.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Never thought I'd say this, but I really need to rewatch Alfred J. Kwak. I remember it as "that weird duck show from my childhood"… It doesn't seem to be available on any streaming platforms, though.
  - bytehowl 4y ago
    There's a bunch of playlists on YT as mentioned in one of the other posts. Here's the first one that came up for me (AI upscaled, apparently): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSaUrah-p_nqNYjF3iM7CUFQKMoruDUV https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSaUrah-p_nqNYjF3iM7...
  - radicalbyte 4y ago
    I've watched pretty much every episode at least 50 times, my wife also watched it as a kid and got our oldest addicted to it. Fantastic cartoon, impressive how they handled facisme. Guess certain Dutch politicians either didn't see it or did and got inspired by Dolf. In related news, I've also seen every episode of True and Nijnje (90s, 00s and specials) a similar number of times for kid #2 and kid #3 :) I grew up in the UK so as a kid I was traumatised by Yellow Submarine, Tottie (dollhouse burns down killing everyone), Watership Down and the aforementioned Animals of Farthing Wood.
david38 4y ago
That bird is a shrike. Pretty rough for a cartoon.
gonzo41 4y ago
That's wild, and really heavy. I'm so glad I didn't see that when I was a kid.

davidkuennen 4y ago

I've watched "Watership Down" as a child. It's one of my more vivid memories from back then to put it mildly.

hackeraccount 4y ago
Or The Plague Dogs. I didn't read the book but saw the movie. Just a touch grim.
kstenerud 4y ago
Watership Down and the Secret of Nimh were my two favorite movies as a young child in the early 80s, followed closely by the Dark Crystal and maybe Aristocats and the Black Hole. Other movies of the time like the Rescuers and the Fox and the Hound and Labyrinth and such were a disappointment compared to these...
- onei 4y ago
  I've been curious about the Dark Crystal - was it particularly groundbreaking when it came out? I watched it after watching the more recent Netflix series and found the story pretty dreary. Similarly, I've heard Tron was almost revolutionary by the standards of the day, but the CGI is almost comical to watch now.
  - kstenerud 4y ago
    Both were groundbreaking and revolutionary. They were very ambitious projects due to the technology limitations of the time, and crossed well into the "labour of love" realm, in the same vein as Pinnochio (for example the animated bubbles in the crashing waves).
  - mbreese 4y ago
    (Not the OP) I can’t say it was ground breaking, as I was a kid at the time, but it was one of the great movies of my childhood. I remember watching it many times over. I do remember the characters seeming less real, and I still knew they were puppets. But this was also the era of Sesame Street, so a movie by Jim Henson that had puppets was kinda normal. I think the fact that my parents talked about it so highly probably answers your question more — it was something adults appreciated. Ultimately, to me, the Dark Crystal wasn’t a great movie because I feel the story was there to service the technique, even if the technique was masterfully used. Maybe I was too young to fully appreciate it. Tron was much the same. At the time, you knew it wasn’t great, but it was still new. Like the targeting computer CGI for the Star Wars trench run, the effects weren’t great. Even at the time, it was a little spartan. But the effects moved the story, and worked well enough to not be a distraction (and you had never seen anything like it before). Tron was just as much about what it foretold as much as the CGI that was available at the time. But in contrast to the Dark Crystal, I liked the story behind Tron more. I would say that both were groundbreaking for how they pushed techniques of movie making forward. The world creation in both were amazing and they both set a new bar for future movies to meet.

senko 4y ago

Yes, Bambi is an utterly depressing story. Most original material Disney adapted was bleakier and more grisly than the adaptation. Most of the tales collected by brothers Grimm would today be horror stories. (Did you know that Cinderella's evil stepsisters had their toes and heels cut off so they could fit in the slippers? Or that the ravens pecked their eyes as punishment? Or that Maleficent ends up in a boiling cauldron full of vipers?) I bet Disney would be able to adapt even something like "Requiem for a Dream" into a happy hero-coming-of-age story. You lose a lot if the only version of these classics you've seen (or read, or heard) is Disney's sweet & shiny simulacra.

derbOac 4y ago
Many of the Grimm tales in their original form were also somewhat bizarre or surreal. I agree with you, but sometimes think the Disney versions were crafted as they were in part just to make sense as much as anything.
- dc-programmer 4y ago
  The stories were probably much more coherent to the folks living in the cultures they were conceived. At least at an intuitive and visceral level. There’s a theory that Hansel and Grettel represents a cultural memory of a time of famine where children were abandoned, left to starve.
- MichaelMoser123 4y ago
  not just them, look at "thousand and one nights", but not at an adaption, look at something close to the original, these used to be very cruel, also the old Russian folk tales used to be quite cruel. I think they all used to live in a very different reality, with people dying at an earlier age and much more often then they do now. Also infant mortality was much much higher in the olden days; it was a scary time, altogether. The olden days didn't have the luxury of clean water, antibiotics and food plenty. These are quite recent inventions...
baud147258 4y ago
For Cinderella, the story also existed in an older version told by Perrault, which is way less bleak than Grimm's tale. Especially as the Disney adaptation is closer to Perrault's tale (cf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella#Cendrillon_ou_la_petite_pantoufle_de_verre,_by_Perrault https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella#Cendrillon_ou_la_pe...)

spanktheuser 4y ago

It wasn't the first horror film my children saw (they watched Jaws, Alien, and Stranger Things) but the most terrifying and traumatic experience they've seen was the shipwreck scene in the Black Stallion. If you want to frighten children, murder what they love while they watch: their parents and animals. Coincidence both Bambi and the Black Stallion were written during or in the immediate aftermath of world wars?

masklinn 4y ago
> Coincidence both Bambi and the Black Stallion were written during or in the immediate aftermath of world wars? Meh. Every generation has its angsts, and writers putting it down to paper. Watership down was written in the very late 60s / very early 70s.
- anthk 4y ago
  Bambi was a movie for war kids who lost a parent (or both) in the war.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
One thing I've really noticed is that a lot of people - children and adults both - have no qualms about depictions of violence and murder of people in media, but they get really squeamish when it's (cute) animals. I wonder what causes that, is it just a kind of desensitization? Or a built-in kind of justice that bad people dying is fine but innocent animals isn't?
- kumarsw 4y ago
  This is a pretty well-observed phenomenon that the relative sadness of humans and cute animals dying in movies and real life is (presumably) reversed. Someone had even coined a term for it - “dog-dying-in-movie sad.” I’m at a loss to explain why, but it feels like Peak Internet Discussion so hopefully someone here will feel like expanding on it.
  - 4y ago

fennecfoxen 4y ago

If we're talking about bleaker topics in older Disney works, I'll ask you to take a moment and consider the entire premise of _Dumbo_ (1939). Why are the other elephants scandalized by the baby elephant with the big ears, asking what Mr. Jumbo would think? Why did they mean, just a few moments earlier when they said elephants are "a proud race"? Why would they shun him, declaring that he is not one of their kind? ... What kind of elephant has big ears?

ginko 4y ago
>What kind of elephant has big ears? African elephants? But the original Jumbo[1] was also an African elephant. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo
chasd00 4y ago
The tear jerking properties of the treatment of Dumbo’s mother doesn’t get enough attention. There really is no greater love than that of a mother for her child. / notice I said “greater” leaving space for an equal ie a father’s love
- nemo44x 4y ago
  > There really is no greater love than that of a mother for her child. You don't really know the intensity and unconditionality of the love your own mother has/had for you until you have kids yourself and see how your wife loves your child. I always appreciated my mother, but I was only able to fully appreciate her after I had kids myself.
  - mberning 4y ago
    Totally agree. I go pretty far out of my way to make sure my mom gets plenty of time with her grandson, which she loves. It also burns my ass to hear my wife say “I couldn’t have imagined how much I would like being a mom”. Society and culture is so screwed up around children and raising a family.
    - 4y ago

rendall 4y ago

Bambi meets Godzilla https://youtu.be/8s3UogfAGg0 https://youtu.be/8s3UogfAGg0

chasd00 4y ago

To me Bambi’s mom being killed is much milder than the death of Mufasa in The Lion King. In The Lion King you see the violence first hand and then the betrayal of a family member leading to a child’s self inflicted exile.

washadjeffmad 4y ago
I resonated with the fear and pain of those moments of not knowing after the shot and subsequent feeling of loss in Bambi much more acutely than the dramatized witnessing of the fall in TLK. The conflict between Scar and Mufasa had a song and jaunty lead up, so the betrayal wasn't much of a surprise. The death of Bambi's mother felt senseless and shocking. What gain could her death have served her killer? Why did she have to die? Who would care for the innocent and vulnerable Bambi?
- mrwh 4y ago
  Exactly! Why did she die? So someone could have a moment of pleasure, someone who then never gave her another thought.

sandGorgon 4y ago

has anyone ever seen Saturday Night Live's take on Bambi ? With "The Rock" ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFJz2IMUeDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFJz2IMUeDE

drakonka 4y ago

I have just realized that I may not have seen the Bambi movie I thought I saw as a child, because I could swear I remember seeing some of the scenes this article claims never made it into the film. I remember the oak leaf conversation from somewhere, as well as some of the harsher scenes they said were cut from the Disney version. I wonder if I read the book and forgot about it.

photochemsyn 4y ago

For some reason I got my hands on George Orwell's "Animal Farm" at a very young age, as it looked like a kid's book. That's a fairly bleak book, for example when the pigs sell the draft horse to the glue factory, but only the goat (whose only friend is the horse) knows what's going on. Watership Down is another good one, the character of the Black Rabbit of Inle (the Grim Reaper of rabbitkind) was memorable. However I disagree with claims that these kind of works 'traumatize' young readers. It's just an introduction to life's realities - everyone has to die, nature is beautiful but also violent, and humans can be crueler to each other than any animal ever could. Kids aren't traumatized by reading, or by playing video games - if trauma occurs, it's due to things like war and poverty and neglect and abuse.

fsloth 4y ago
I read the Animal Farm to my below K12 kids on one sitting and they were hooked. Kids needs scary stories in a safe environment. This will help them process these thoughts and prepare them for the inevitable trauma they will face at some point in their life. Animal Farm is also not a bleak read but also fun as you can do all the animal voices with their characteristic animal sounds.
- TaupeRanger 4y ago
  Stories don't prepare kids for trauma, and I don't think there's any real evidence in support of that idea. I would wager a large sum that a child who has heard scary stories is not more likely to better handle, say, the loss of an immediate family member, than a child who has only heard happy stories about unicorns, rainbows, and friendly interactions.
  - r3trohack3r 4y ago
    Not commenting on whether you’re right or wrong, but that’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison there - nearly to the point of arguing in bad faith. A more apt comparison might be a story about urban war where the main character looses many immediate family members (and explores the grieving process against the backdrop of the war) - and how that would help a kid process the loss of an immediate family member.

geocrasher 4y ago

Bambi was actually a favorite of mine growing up, but The Princess Bride scared the living daylights out of me.

gumby 4y ago

The same gruesome scene begins the Babar odyssey, though unlike Bambi, it’s all on the page.

earthboundkid 4y ago
There's a Barbar cartoon (by Nelvana, which is Canadian, so now it's on YouTube because Canadian media companies haven't all been gobbled up yet), so your kids can have the horror of watching young Babar see the hunters attack his family. My 3YO loved it.

thomaspark 4y ago

I made a browser extension called No Scary Parts that skips traumatic scenes on Disney+ while trying to hold together a cohesive plot. Mainly for young kids who enjoy the music and other scenes, but aren't ready for the full story yet. https://thomaspark.co/projects/no-scary-parts/ https://thomaspark.co/projects/no-scary-parts/ Fantasia was easy. Managed to do The Lion King. Haven't been able to pull off Bambi yet...

copperx 4y ago
> Fantasia was easy You no need an extension for that one. As a kid, I tried to watch it multiple times and I always fell asleep. And I was a very patient kid.
- micheljansen 4y ago
  “Night on bald mountain” with Czernobog and his creepy fire slave demon things gave me nightmares for months.
- lostgame 4y ago
  That you never got to the ending is why you consider it child appropriate. :P

Johnny555 4y ago

As jarring as Bambi was as a child, as an adult, the opening to Pixar's "Up" is far more heart wrenching.

aidenn0 4y ago
A large fraction of Pixar's output includes scenes that prompt a small child to ask "Why are you crying mommy/daddy?"

dimensionc132 4y ago

In Germany it is not uncommon, or it was not uncommon when i was a child, for parents to read horror stories to their children; Der Struwelpeter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter Scared the living crap out of me, especially the story of Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug ("The Very Sad Tale with the Matches"): A girl plays with matches, accidentally ignites herself and burns to death.

boredumb 4y ago

This is the most insufferable thing I've ever read in my entire life. This reads like chocolate cake with chocolate icing drizzled in chocolate syrup for smug individuals to read from the backseat of a private car service. The amount of faux insights and pop politic buzzwords while ending this with questions of whether bambi is a parable for jewish existence is astonishing and I found myself wondering if this was a parody paper submitted to the New Yorker to trick an editor into publishing it.

nemo44x 4y ago
Did you even read it or finish it? It explicitly makes the case it is NOT a parable for Jews, as it is often interpreted, but rather the human condition in general. From the article: "“Bambi” is not a parable about the plight of the Jews, but Salten sometimes regards the plight of the Jews as a parable about the human condition. The omnipresence and inevitability of danger, the need to act for oneself and seize control of one’s fate, the threat posed by intimates and strangers alike: this is Salten’s assessment of our existence." That was the case the author was building up to the entire time. To each their own, but I thought it was an incredibly well written article.
s1artibartfast 4y ago
welcome to the newyorker.

greggman3 4y ago

It actually upsets me there aren't more harsh stories for kids. I'm a huge One Piece fan (on of Japan's most popular manga and anime for the last 22 years). In the first season, one of the main characters has her adopted mother murdered right in front of her when she's like 7 years old. And, if that's not bad enough, her town is taken over by thugs, she spends the next 10 years working on a plan to get rid of the thugs while basically being a slave to them. Only to have them discover and ruin her plan making all the sacrifies she made those 10 years in vain. The show at a basic level is kind of silly and definitely for kids at some level but these heart wrenching moments are what made the show. Unfortunately, 2-3 seasons later they started pulling their punches. Characters would sacrifice themselves (so heart strings tugged) and then a few episodes later they'd show up with a few bandages recovering. Fortunately there's still been a few major un-pulled gut punches later in the series.

wara23arish 4y ago

One folklore story we grew up with as kids was as simple as, you misbehave -> some stranger called “Bag man” will come take you in a big bag I don’t remember ever being actually scared of it but remember it since ever my memory had formed.

brewdad 4y ago
Did you grow up in the Mob?

sbate1987 4y ago

[dead]

tehnub 4y ago

I recall something Stanley Kubrick said about Bambi being traumatizing: I saw Mary Poppins three times, because of my children, and I like Julie Andrews so much that I enjoyed seeing it three times. I thought it was a charming film. I wouldn’t want to make it, but … Children’s films are an area that should not just be left to the Disney Studios, who I don’t think really make very good children’s films. I’m talking about his cartoon features, which always seemed to me to have shocking and brutal elements in them that really upset children. I could never understand why they were thought to be so suitable. When Bambi’s mother dies this has got to be one of the most traumatic experiences a five-year-old could encounter. I think that there should be censorship for children on films of violence. I mean, if I didn’t know what Psycho was, and my children went to see it when they were six or seven, thinking they were going to see a mystery story, I would have been very angry, and I think they’d have been terribly upset. I don’t see how this would interfere with freedom of artistic expression. If films are overly violent or shocking, children under twelve should not be allowed to see them. I think that would be a very useful form of censorship.

hinkley 4y ago
I think as adults we downplay how difficult first experiences can be, and so I don't think we get that the stories of loss and struggle in kids movies are speaking to them about real problems they either already have or will soon. Miyazaki has for some people become an alternative to Disney, but his work is full of Dumbo and Bambi moments. The difference is that in his work, the girl (and it is almost always a girl protagonist) is often substantially responsible for saving themselves, by reasonable means. They are not rescued by a boy or by deux ex machina. Even in My Neighbor Totoro, which is almost but not quite an exception to this rule, the youngest (who is a main character, but not the main character) is saved by a magic bus. However, the main character initiates this rescue by digging deep and calling on resources she might not have thought to exploit. She asks for help from the most powerful person she knows and she gets it. She has to ask, and the terms of the rescue are very defined. Nobody white-knights her, nobody swoops in and reads her mind. But the main struggle in that story is not a lost child. It is Death. And this resolves itself rather than being resolved by the characters, not through a miracle, but by discovering that the children don't know the situation and have invented a story that is much scarier than reality. In the end most of their fears are unfounded, and while life won't be everything they hoped, it's going to be much better than their internal catastrophizing.

westcort 4y ago

My key takeaways: 1. This year, “Bambi: A Life in the Woods” has entered the public domain, and the Chambers version has been joined by a new one: “The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest” (Princeton), translated by Jack Zipes, with wonderful black-and-white illustrations by Alenka Sottler 2. Stephen King called “Bambi” the first horror movie he ever saw, and Pauline Kael, the longtime film critic for this magazine, claimed that she had ever known children to be as frightened by supposedly scary grownup movies as they were by “Bambi.” 3. The film in question is, of course, the 1942 Walt Disney classic “Bambi.” Perhaps more than any other movie made for children, it is remembered chiefly for its moments of terror: not only the killing of the hero’s mother but the forest fire that threatens all the main characters with annihilation 4. With the old Prince’s prompting, Bambi concludes from this experience not that we humans are a danger even unto one another but, rather, that other animals are foolish for imagining that we are gods merely because we are powerful 5. It was adapted from “Bambi: A Life in the Woods,” a 1922 novel by the Austro-Hungarian writer and critic Felix Salten 6. What makes it such a startling source for a beloved children’s classic is ultimately not its violence or its sadness but its bleakness 7. The implicit moral is not so much that killing animals is wicked as that people are wicked and wild animals are innocent 8. Salten insisted that he wrote “Bambi” to educate naïve readers about nature as it really is: a place where life is always contingent on death, where starvation, competition, and predation are the norm 9. What purpose are scenes like that one serving in this book? Salten maintained that, despite his own affinity for hunting, he was trying to dissuade others from killing animals except when it was necessary for the health of a species or an ecosystem 10. What are we to make of this muddy, many-minded story? Zipes, in his introduction, blames some of the confusion on Chambers, contending that he mistranslated Salten, flattening both the political and the metaphysical dimensions of the work and paving the way for Disney to turn it into a children’s story Other works of Felix Salten: https://www.locserendipity.com/TitleSearch.html?q=Salten https://www.locserendipity.com/TitleSearch.html?q=Salten

bradlys 4y ago

A lot of weird people in here basically arguing for goatse to be shown to children. There’s no good reason to show children traumatic events. A lot of them do internalize it. Just because you didn’t doesn’t mean others won’t. This has little to do with bad parenting or other such things. Some children are just able to take what is in a film and vividly imagine it towards their own life or have too much sympathy. HN obviously isn’t a great place to get advice about how to raise children from people who are known to be chronic over workers and absentee parents…

drno123 4y ago

Finding Nemo also has a sad beginning. And the beginning of Up is both sad and sobering. But none of those I see as traumatising. On the other hand, The little prince basically sells suicide to kids. And all the teachers always praise this book and force kids to read it while obviously the book is not written for children.

amelius 4y ago

The saddest part is that the greatest idea-thief of all is the one who extended the copyright term.

emmelaich 4y ago

Live kids movies used to be pretty savage too. I showed my young kids Born Free and Old Yeller. Well, in the first, lions eat some people in the first scene. In the second movie, the wild pigs attack is terrifying. Never mind the rabid animals. They didn't want to see my recommendations after those two.

TheRealNGenius 4y ago

yawn. too long and no pictures. it's no wonder no one here actually read it.

tunesmith 4y ago

I grew up with this book. I absolutely loved it, and spent several years not thinking about it, until I remembered the chapter of the two leaves, which was my favorite chapter. I dug it up again and read it aloud to my wife. Just a wonderful book. I didn't really come away with half the interpretations that the author of this piece had, but that's okay. I didn't see it as an allegory for anything. I just loved how unromantic and poetic it was at the same time. I could analyze the book any which way, but the overall feeling it left me with is cohesive, strong, and original. As for this piece, I wish he had gone more into the difference between the translations. That's how the piece started, and it ended with him simply saying the Chambers translation (the pre-existing one) is better. Didn't even include a comparison example.

hanoz 4y ago

Ironic that the title of this post is now a sanitised version of the original in order to protect the sensitivities of the modern Hacker News readership.

dynamic_sausage 4y ago

Some of the tales from my childhood that I hold very dear to this day looked at really tough topics: death, solitude, betrayal. "Ronia, the Robber's Daughter", "Timm Thaler, or the Traded Laughter", "The Adventures of Sajo and her Beaver People" by Lindgren, Krüss, and Grey Owl are some that come to mind. Their authors were interesting, complicated people who had something to say about the world they lived in. Proponents of the coddling style of child rearing would probably declare them "traumatizing" and "inappropriate" for the 7- or 8-year old kid that I was when I read them. What turned out to be really traumatizing though was the real world, not these fairy tales — which ended up teaching me some pretty helpful lessons after all.