Post by Bambi on Apr 4, 2008 13:38:53 GMT -5
The following interviews are from what I have been able to transcribe from the "Bambi" movie soundtrack that I own. 
Mr. Walt Disney
Interviewer: We're here to talk about Bambi, the re-release of Bambi. I understand that it took you seven years to develop and produce Bambi. What did you see in the Bambi project to carry it through those seven years? How come it took so long?
WD: Well, actually, it was a change of pace for us from what we've been doing. Snow White , Pinnochio and the others were more of the obvious cartoon type of characters, but with Bambi, there was a need for a subtlety in our animation, a need for more of a lifelike type of animation, and, well, there was a certain awe in respect we had of this classic of Bambi that I decided that, number one, I had to put my artists back in school to learn something that is, well, something that you don't get in the formal art of education; that is, you'd get human anatomy, and this was animal anatomy, and, beyond that, animal locomotion; you know, movement and things, so I put them in school and had my artists specially trained for this one picture, and when I finally went into production, I just couldn't put every artist I had on it, so I had to take a select team, and that cut the size of the staff down to the point that it took longer, but I think the in-result was worth that, because in studying the animals, we brought deer in, brought them into the art classes and let them munch hay and things to keep them quiet as the artists were drawing the animals, but that wasn't enough; we had to see them more as they actually behaved in nature, and I found a naturalist photographer. He had done some beautiful work out in the open country, and I made a deal with him to cover the action of these animals as they actually lived their life. He went into the Maine country, went into different parts of the country where he could find the animals, and photographed them for me, and he caught them just living their lives as nature intended.
I: Now, I've counted them, and there are only 950 words of dialogue in Bambi. Why so few words in a feature motion picture?
WD: Well, we thought we got a little gabby with it. I mean, we were striving for fewer words to begin with, because we wanted the action and the music to carry it more or less, and we finally ended up with 200 more words *chuckles* than we thought we first started out than what we have wanted to have in it.
I: Isn't there a little bit of Bambi in Walt Disney, or, for that matter, in everything you try to do?
WD: Well, I don't know. *chuckles* I never thought of myself that way. I mean, who I'd be? Thumper or Flower or what, you know? *chuckles* But I think the thing might be that I am a lover of nature (and I respect nature very much), and I feel that through watching and observing the habits of the creatures of nature, man can learn a lot.
Mr. Oliver [Ollie] Johnston and Mr. Frank Thomas, supervising animators on "Bambi"
OJ: This is really a beautiful story. Walt took out all the "survival of the fittest." You know, animals killing each other and everything, so there's none of that. There's just beautiful relationships between the characters which were very warm, and that's what he wanted. He wanted these characters to be warm for the audience to like them. I think he succeeded there in the fact that you love Bambi, is why you feel sore for him when his mother died, which, you see, lots of pictures have a mother or a parent dies, and I think you have to tell those stories, and I think this was beautifully told and was powerful because of that. I don't think we've ever done anything more believable on the screen than that. It was such a finality to it when she died. This wasn't a fantasy, and there was no prince to kiss someone to bring back to life, there was no fairy to wave a wand. This was it. Of course, it made everything really believable that followed there: the fire and when Bambi gets shot. Everything that happened from then on, you couldn't help but believe it.
FT: It was necessary as a kind of picture that needed that. A lot of the others had different types of entertainment in them, and the more laughs and rolicking around. The only laughs we were able to get from the Bambi story were from the kids (you know, Thumper and Bambi running around and playing).
OJ: Thumper was such a precocious little guy, and the way he took over with Bambi, you know, directing everything he did and criticizing him. *chuckles* They had a great relationship between the two.
FT: Very sincere.
OJ: Yeah.
FT: You'd never be able to fake that voice or that attitude or that character, and this was Peter Behn. It wasn't until we found his voice quite by accident, when the whole thing began to gel.
OJ: Tell them about the voice. I mean, *chuckles* how we almost lost it.
FT: Yeah. *chuckles* Oh, they brought in a group of kids to do the bunny family, and they had this scene where they met Bambi for the first time and he'd fall down when learning how to walk, so they gave each kid, saying, "Now, you say 'What's the matter?' and you say, 'What happened?' and you say, 'Did the young prince fall down?' and you say, 'Is he hurt?'" and they said, "Everybody got it?" and the kids said, "Yep," and so here we rolled the tape (we didn't have tape when we rolled the film), and the first little girl says: "What's the matter?" "What happened?" "DID THE YOUNG PRINCE FALL DOWN?" *chuckles* And so the guy says, "Hey, get that kid out of here. He can't act." So, they sent him home the next day, and when the animators heard the film, they said, "Holy great voice! Who is that kid? Get him in here!" So they quickly had to scramble around to try to find him again. *both OJ and FT chuckle* But, in the meantime, we picked a very nice voice for Bambi: very innocent, sweet, just real appealing young voice, and his mother said, "How soon will you be needing him?" We said, "Oh, not for about six weeks," and she said, "Oh, we have a chance to do a film over at 20th Century with all the child stars. Could we take that job, and wouldn't it interfere him?" We said, "Oh, no, no, no. That would be just fine." So she came back and the kid was ruined, because he had this Hollywood cutesy voice. He had lost all the sincerity, all the innocence, *talks in a nasty, sarcastic voice* "talking back like a little kid like they do in Hollywood." *normal voice* We had to get rid of him and cast all over again for for the young Bambi voice. Uh, see, they had started Bambi way back (it was to be our second picture, starting almost the same time as Snow White). Walt didn't quite know what to do with how to make a picture out of it. As I said, the book did not have any material you could make a picture out of. It was just a philosophy of life in the forest. As Walt worked on the thing trying to get ideas in a purchase to it, he'd move it back on the schedule and move Pinnochio and Fantasia ahead, but this method, his men were ahead of all departments (music, color, everything), and they had a chance to experiment and develop way beyond what they ever would have done, otherwise. So, now we knew what you could do by working to music with no dialogue (powerful things), and it had given Walt confidence in our ability to make movements that seem to fit the music, and the audience would accept of it, they'd be swept along by the whole panorama of sound and picture. As we were saying earlier about the picture trying to get a believable philosophy of the forest, I think Walt realized very early that he would not be able to do it with a lot of dialogue of a storytelling type of thing, and he had to rely on beautiful artwork and the music to create a mood, a feeling, and he was able to work through several artists, mainly Ty[rus] Wong, a Chinese artist who did beautiful work on the forest.
OJ: Delicate and settle. He worked in pastel.
FT: And then you'd get music along with it, and, of course, our favorite story on that was: Ed Plumb was writing the music for the fire at the end of Bambi, and Walt didn't feel that it was strong enough, and he had been looking at the reels on Fantasia in the projection booth next door, so he called up and asked, "Do you still got that Beethoven stuff there of 'The Storm'?" Ed said, "Yeah," and Walt said, "Well, put it on against this fire sequence in Bambi and see how it looks." So, they ran it, and Walt said, "Yeah! Yeah! That's the stuff! It's got the feeling." Then Ed said, "But, Walt, that's Beethoven!" And Walt says, "Yeah?"
*both OJ and FT laugh*
OJ: "Go ahead! Write some Beethoven!"
*both laugh and clear their throats*
Mr. Henry Mancini
HM: Well, the thing that I like about it with the whole approach of the music was that it was just first class. You know, with the ins and outs, because when you have that much music in a picture, the problem is the art getting in and out of the various sections, and a big, big plus to that picture was Charles Henderson, the choral director, and that was a very important contribution, not because they were singing songs. You know, this must have been one of the first times when they used the mixed chorus as a background with just vowels and things like that ("oohs," "ahhs," and stuff like that), and it was used as scoring. They used the chorus as a scoring tool and it kind of humanized the picture. It gave certain scenes a heart when the chorus came in just as a background; it kind of eumanized it even more so when they were just singing words. It was a clever device, and it brought a lot of heart to the picture. I've been through the process of animation several times. I've done the Disney picture The Great Mouse Detective, and did The Pink Panther, and animated main titles, and you find that there's no help out there but just you in the picture usually, and it's very exposed, and the way that the arrangers and composers kind of quilted it together and made the changes of mood. Of course, it was done pictorally, but they do that; that's what the animators do. To do that for the ears is not easy; it's quite difficult. There are great scenes in many films that have to do with chases and fights and great terror and that sort of thing, but the thing that was impressive about this one, to me (although those were all great, very well done and well-concieved, orchestrated, composed, and everything that fit beautifully), the most telling moments were the times like when the raindrops start on the pond. It starts with one clarinet, and there's another drop, and another drop, and then it builds, and before you know it, they've got you sucked into an introd to a song, and you never really knew it. You see, usually, introductions are quite obvious in movies, but this was done so artfully, that once the song came on, you said, "Oh, that was an introduction! I thought that was part of the song!" So, moments like that in some of the very tender moments which are much...not much difficult to say, but they are difficult to achieve those kinds of breathless moments where there's nothing but that sound and the little effect of the raindrop hitting the water in the circle, so those are difficult things. Those are not easy, and the concept of everybody: the animators and the musicians was just great. They work together very closely, and you have to work very close to have something like that come off, but, to me, it's just a great piece of cinema and theater.
Mr. Walt Disney
Interviewer: We're here to talk about Bambi, the re-release of Bambi. I understand that it took you seven years to develop and produce Bambi. What did you see in the Bambi project to carry it through those seven years? How come it took so long?
WD: Well, actually, it was a change of pace for us from what we've been doing. Snow White , Pinnochio and the others were more of the obvious cartoon type of characters, but with Bambi, there was a need for a subtlety in our animation, a need for more of a lifelike type of animation, and, well, there was a certain awe in respect we had of this classic of Bambi that I decided that, number one, I had to put my artists back in school to learn something that is, well, something that you don't get in the formal art of education; that is, you'd get human anatomy, and this was animal anatomy, and, beyond that, animal locomotion; you know, movement and things, so I put them in school and had my artists specially trained for this one picture, and when I finally went into production, I just couldn't put every artist I had on it, so I had to take a select team, and that cut the size of the staff down to the point that it took longer, but I think the in-result was worth that, because in studying the animals, we brought deer in, brought them into the art classes and let them munch hay and things to keep them quiet as the artists were drawing the animals, but that wasn't enough; we had to see them more as they actually behaved in nature, and I found a naturalist photographer. He had done some beautiful work out in the open country, and I made a deal with him to cover the action of these animals as they actually lived their life. He went into the Maine country, went into different parts of the country where he could find the animals, and photographed them for me, and he caught them just living their lives as nature intended.
I: Now, I've counted them, and there are only 950 words of dialogue in Bambi. Why so few words in a feature motion picture?
WD: Well, we thought we got a little gabby with it. I mean, we were striving for fewer words to begin with, because we wanted the action and the music to carry it more or less, and we finally ended up with 200 more words *chuckles* than we thought we first started out than what we have wanted to have in it.
I: Isn't there a little bit of Bambi in Walt Disney, or, for that matter, in everything you try to do?
WD: Well, I don't know. *chuckles* I never thought of myself that way. I mean, who I'd be? Thumper or Flower or what, you know? *chuckles* But I think the thing might be that I am a lover of nature (and I respect nature very much), and I feel that through watching and observing the habits of the creatures of nature, man can learn a lot.
Mr. Oliver [Ollie] Johnston and Mr. Frank Thomas, supervising animators on "Bambi"
OJ: This is really a beautiful story. Walt took out all the "survival of the fittest." You know, animals killing each other and everything, so there's none of that. There's just beautiful relationships between the characters which were very warm, and that's what he wanted. He wanted these characters to be warm for the audience to like them. I think he succeeded there in the fact that you love Bambi, is why you feel sore for him when his mother died, which, you see, lots of pictures have a mother or a parent dies, and I think you have to tell those stories, and I think this was beautifully told and was powerful because of that. I don't think we've ever done anything more believable on the screen than that. It was such a finality to it when she died. This wasn't a fantasy, and there was no prince to kiss someone to bring back to life, there was no fairy to wave a wand. This was it. Of course, it made everything really believable that followed there: the fire and when Bambi gets shot. Everything that happened from then on, you couldn't help but believe it.
FT: It was necessary as a kind of picture that needed that. A lot of the others had different types of entertainment in them, and the more laughs and rolicking around. The only laughs we were able to get from the Bambi story were from the kids (you know, Thumper and Bambi running around and playing).
OJ: Thumper was such a precocious little guy, and the way he took over with Bambi, you know, directing everything he did and criticizing him. *chuckles* They had a great relationship between the two.
FT: Very sincere.
OJ: Yeah.
FT: You'd never be able to fake that voice or that attitude or that character, and this was Peter Behn. It wasn't until we found his voice quite by accident, when the whole thing began to gel.
OJ: Tell them about the voice. I mean, *chuckles* how we almost lost it.
FT: Yeah. *chuckles* Oh, they brought in a group of kids to do the bunny family, and they had this scene where they met Bambi for the first time and he'd fall down when learning how to walk, so they gave each kid, saying, "Now, you say 'What's the matter?' and you say, 'What happened?' and you say, 'Did the young prince fall down?' and you say, 'Is he hurt?'" and they said, "Everybody got it?" and the kids said, "Yep," and so here we rolled the tape (we didn't have tape when we rolled the film), and the first little girl says: "What's the matter?" "What happened?" "DID THE YOUNG PRINCE FALL DOWN?" *chuckles* And so the guy says, "Hey, get that kid out of here. He can't act." So, they sent him home the next day, and when the animators heard the film, they said, "Holy great voice! Who is that kid? Get him in here!" So they quickly had to scramble around to try to find him again. *both OJ and FT chuckle* But, in the meantime, we picked a very nice voice for Bambi: very innocent, sweet, just real appealing young voice, and his mother said, "How soon will you be needing him?" We said, "Oh, not for about six weeks," and she said, "Oh, we have a chance to do a film over at 20th Century with all the child stars. Could we take that job, and wouldn't it interfere him?" We said, "Oh, no, no, no. That would be just fine." So she came back and the kid was ruined, because he had this Hollywood cutesy voice. He had lost all the sincerity, all the innocence, *talks in a nasty, sarcastic voice* "talking back like a little kid like they do in Hollywood." *normal voice* We had to get rid of him and cast all over again for for the young Bambi voice. Uh, see, they had started Bambi way back (it was to be our second picture, starting almost the same time as Snow White). Walt didn't quite know what to do with how to make a picture out of it. As I said, the book did not have any material you could make a picture out of. It was just a philosophy of life in the forest. As Walt worked on the thing trying to get ideas in a purchase to it, he'd move it back on the schedule and move Pinnochio and Fantasia ahead, but this method, his men were ahead of all departments (music, color, everything), and they had a chance to experiment and develop way beyond what they ever would have done, otherwise. So, now we knew what you could do by working to music with no dialogue (powerful things), and it had given Walt confidence in our ability to make movements that seem to fit the music, and the audience would accept of it, they'd be swept along by the whole panorama of sound and picture. As we were saying earlier about the picture trying to get a believable philosophy of the forest, I think Walt realized very early that he would not be able to do it with a lot of dialogue of a storytelling type of thing, and he had to rely on beautiful artwork and the music to create a mood, a feeling, and he was able to work through several artists, mainly Ty[rus] Wong, a Chinese artist who did beautiful work on the forest.
OJ: Delicate and settle. He worked in pastel.
FT: And then you'd get music along with it, and, of course, our favorite story on that was: Ed Plumb was writing the music for the fire at the end of Bambi, and Walt didn't feel that it was strong enough, and he had been looking at the reels on Fantasia in the projection booth next door, so he called up and asked, "Do you still got that Beethoven stuff there of 'The Storm'?" Ed said, "Yeah," and Walt said, "Well, put it on against this fire sequence in Bambi and see how it looks." So, they ran it, and Walt said, "Yeah! Yeah! That's the stuff! It's got the feeling." Then Ed said, "But, Walt, that's Beethoven!" And Walt says, "Yeah?"
*both OJ and FT laugh*
OJ: "Go ahead! Write some Beethoven!"
*both laugh and clear their throats*
Mr. Henry Mancini
HM: Well, the thing that I like about it with the whole approach of the music was that it was just first class. You know, with the ins and outs, because when you have that much music in a picture, the problem is the art getting in and out of the various sections, and a big, big plus to that picture was Charles Henderson, the choral director, and that was a very important contribution, not because they were singing songs. You know, this must have been one of the first times when they used the mixed chorus as a background with just vowels and things like that ("oohs," "ahhs," and stuff like that), and it was used as scoring. They used the chorus as a scoring tool and it kind of humanized the picture. It gave certain scenes a heart when the chorus came in just as a background; it kind of eumanized it even more so when they were just singing words. It was a clever device, and it brought a lot of heart to the picture. I've been through the process of animation several times. I've done the Disney picture The Great Mouse Detective, and did The Pink Panther, and animated main titles, and you find that there's no help out there but just you in the picture usually, and it's very exposed, and the way that the arrangers and composers kind of quilted it together and made the changes of mood. Of course, it was done pictorally, but they do that; that's what the animators do. To do that for the ears is not easy; it's quite difficult. There are great scenes in many films that have to do with chases and fights and great terror and that sort of thing, but the thing that was impressive about this one, to me (although those were all great, very well done and well-concieved, orchestrated, composed, and everything that fit beautifully), the most telling moments were the times like when the raindrops start on the pond. It starts with one clarinet, and there's another drop, and another drop, and then it builds, and before you know it, they've got you sucked into an introd to a song, and you never really knew it. You see, usually, introductions are quite obvious in movies, but this was done so artfully, that once the song came on, you said, "Oh, that was an introduction! I thought that was part of the song!" So, moments like that in some of the very tender moments which are much...not much difficult to say, but they are difficult to achieve those kinds of breathless moments where there's nothing but that sound and the little effect of the raindrop hitting the water in the circle, so those are difficult things. Those are not easy, and the concept of everybody: the animators and the musicians was just great. They work together very closely, and you have to work very close to have something like that come off, but, to me, it's just a great piece of cinema and theater.
