The Bambi Backstory

While reading Nathalia's Holt's The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History I learned a number of surprising things about the development of Disney's films - both the most iconic and the ones that do not survive on video because of their overt racism (ike Songs of the South) or the ones that have been censored for the same reason (like Fantasia).

But for me the most surprising  revelation of the book was about a Disney movie I've never even seen. Before Bambi made it to film, it was a novel written by Felix Salten and called Bambi: A Life in the Woods.

The author was born in Budapest in 1869, though his family moved when he was a month old to Vienna. The motive, as Holt explains (96) was to gain greater opportunity in a city that had begun granting some rights to Jewish resident in 1867.

Salten had a strong sense of Jewish identity that found expression in his passion for Zionism. Like the fictional Mordechai in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, he was a big advocate for a Jewish homeland.

Salten's novel first saw print in the form of newspaper serialization in Vienna in 1923.

Just over a decade later, the copies of the book were thrown on Nazi bonfires.  Holt  explains (p. 26), "The book was banned not only because of the author's Jewish heritage but also for its metaphors about anti-Semitism. "

While this is a revelation for people familiar with the deer as depicted by Disney animation, back in the early 20th Century, people understood the allegory. Even the description of the butterflies touches on the experience of people who cannot find any permanent home "'always searching further and further because all the good places have already been taken,'" Holt quotes (26).

 Bambi was a means of exploring the themes related to Jewish identity and surivial.  The deer in this story are not carefree creatures but burdened by the persecution they endure from hunters and who have to consider if assimilation is the path to take to survive.

 While some animals adopt "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em" to try to survive with hunters, that strategy fails them, as illustrated by a character who believes wearing a halter will protect him who ends up shot by a hunter. Likewise, the dogs in the novel are described by Bambi's father thus: "'They pass their lives in fear, they hate [Man] and themselves and yet die for His sake'" (quoted in Holt 96).
Though Holt comments on how very appropriate that was for the time at which Bambi is made, it really is a perennial theme for people who have repeatedly been displaced and threatened.

The book is interesting also for the glimpses into working as a woman in what was very much a man's field, and the bad old days of sexism, racism, and persecution of Asians under Roosevelt. If aviation is also of interest, you may enjoy her tangents about the animators who also aspired to fly and their achievements in the air as well as on film.

The prisoner parable

I can't credit a source for this story because I can't find any. I do recall being told it as an illustration of the human desire for meaning. It goes like this:

Once there was a prisoner who was forced to do hard labor. He was assigned to act like a mule, walking around pushing the beam that would turn the heavy stone of a mill located just outside the prison. This work caused aches in his arms and his back and roughed up his hands. But he kept himself motivated by thinking about the output of his work. He took some pride in thinking about how much grain he ground into flour that would be made into bread for the community.

 Every day, he could feel the work he did made a difference in people's lives and that his efforts bore fruit. Finally, his sentence was up, and he finally got to walk outside the prison walls. He hurried over to see the mill stone that he had put in motion for so many years to get the thrill of seeing what his work had accomplished.

 The prison guard laughed at him because no grain ever was ground by that stone. Realizing that all that effort was futile, the ex-prisoner could not even step into his freedom and  collapsed in anguish.


That's the classic version, as I recall it, and it has clear echoes of Sisyphus, though here Sisyphus is allowed to harbor the illusion that each boulder he rolls up is a new one, and only learns that all his effort was futile after his sentence is up.

I'd suggest that where some people are is slightly different. There are several prisoners together in the same situation. However, some of them have cells with a window that lets them catch a glimpse of the millstone. What they realize after some time passes is that no one every delivers grain there, and no one ever picks up flour.

They can't be 100% sure, of course, because they only have a limited view through the window. However, they can infer from what they can see .They start telling their fellow prisoners that they don't believe their works does anything.

Then their fellow prisoners whose cells do not have a view of the mill insist that they are telling them lies and that must believe the guards who know better than they. These prisoner would come to resent the ones who try to tell them that things are not what they seem because they must believe  that their suffering has purpose. Freedom and truth are anathema to them because it would force them to confront the lack of meaning in all the work they have done.

Related: http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2013/11/its-meaningful-life.html