Bambi’s Mother Doesn’t Die In The First Ten Minutes

I thought she did (and you probably did, too), which led to a very long 40 minutes.

Mike Toole
6 min readAug 7, 2020

Each Saturday, our family has movie night. We take turns to pick the movie. I often base my choices on runtime, so I’ve picked a lot of the classics. One thing Disney did right way back in the day was they kept that shit short. Aside from Fantasia, it’s a surprise to find anything more than ninety minutes long.

I had held off on picking Bambi, because of the dead mom. But we had watched several movies with terrifying scenes and my daughter seemed okay with everything. Like, okay to the point where I am wondering if she feels anything while watching these movies. We watched One Hundred and One Dalmatians, and it seemed she could not give a shit that Cruella DeVille is just a straight up dog murderer. When I asked her what she thought of Cruella wanting to kill dogs for fur, she said, “Well, she wasn’t going to kill them. She told those bad guys to do it.”

Yeesh. Anyway, this past Saturday I decided she was ready and also I wanted her to go to bed early. So Bambi, which is one hour and ten minutes long, was my pick.

I have not seen Bambi in probably 35–40 years. I have seen the clip of Bambi running safely back to the thicket and turning to…

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