Bambi

David Hand headed the directing team on this 1942 animation, from Felix Salten’s 1923 novel. Disney bought the rights from MGM’s Sidney Franklin in April 1937; Walt Disney’s insistence on realism drew the production out. Tyrus Wong, the Chinese American painter who set the film’s look, drew the forest not in detail but in mist, silhouette and light: “I tried to keep the thing very, very simple and create the atmosphere, the feeling of the forest.” Walt Disney adopted it and handed him the backgrounds, yet Wong was let go before the film was done, credited only as a background artist. Its 70 minutes lost money on first release, with Europe closed by the war; profit came with the 1947 reissue. All three Academy Award nominations lost, “Love Is a Song” going down to “White Christmas.” Hunters attacked it before release: Outdoor Life editor Raymond J. Brown wanted a foreword calling the picture a fantasy not set in North America, and when Disney refused, the magazine’s September 1942 issue called it an insult to American sportsmen. A good fit if a forest built from mist and light rather than leaves reads as style, not missing work. Not for you if you plan to watch the film’s hardest death, offscreen, one gunshot, no consoling line, beside a small child.