This in an amazing example of a situation where I had NO interest in the subject, not the Bambi book, not the Bambi movie - but the article was so fantastic that I wanted to share it.
“Bambi” Is Even Bleaker Than You Thought
The original book is far more grisly than the beloved Disney classic—and has an unsettling message about humanity.
By Kathryn Schulz
The English-language version, as translated in 1928 by the soon to be Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers, was enormously popular, earning rave reviews and selling six hundred and fifty thousand copies in the dozen-plus years before the film came out. The original version, meanwhile, was banned and burned in Nazi Germany, where it was regarded as a parable about the treatment of Jews in Europe...
Felix Salten was an unlikely figure to write “Bambi,” since he was an ardent hunter who, by his own estimate, shot and killed more than two hundred deer. He was also an unlikely figure to write a parable about Jewish persecution, since, even after the book burnings, he promoted a policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany. And he was an unlikely figure to write one of the most famous children’s stories of the twentieth century, since he wrote one of its most infamous works of child pornography...
The book is at its best when it revels in rather than pretends to resolve the mystery of existence. At one point, Bambi passes by some midges who are discussing a June bug. “How long will he live?” the young ones ask. “Forever, almost,” their elders answer. “They see the sun thirty or forty times.” Elsewhere, a brief chapter records the final conversation of a pair of oak leaves clinging to a branch at the end of autumn. They gripe about the wind and the cold, mourn their fallen peers, and try to understand what is about to happen to them. “Why must we fall?” one asks. The other doesn’t know, but has questions of its own: “Do we feel anything, do we know anything about ourselves when we’re down there?”
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/bambi-is-even-bleaker-than-you-thought