It took 14 months and 9,500 hours to restore and preserve all 110,000 frames of Walt Disney's classic 1942 animated film, "Bambi," the company says, and the end result comes out today on a two-disc DVD ($30).
"This is the first of a major corporate initiative to do film restoration at the studio," says Disney animation director Dave Bossert, who served as artistic supervisor for the "Bambi" restoration.
The studio initiative, Bossert adds, "is about commerce to some degree, but it is about preserving artwork. For me, I equated this process to lying on your back on the scaffolding at the Sistine Chapel with a Q-tip taking centuries of dirt off a fresco. To me it is the same thing. 'Bambi' is a work of art."
One of Disney's greatest animated movies, "Bambi," adapted from Felix Salten's novel, focuses on the natural cycle of a young deer from his birth and adolescence through the birth of his own two fawns. Besides Bambi, who is destined to become the prince of the forest, the beloved characters include the funny bunny Thumper, the shy skunk Flower and the spirited fawn Faline who wins Bambi's heart.
Disney's animators, including the legendary Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, spent three years working on the film that elevated the art of animation with beautiful impressionistic watercolor backgrounds, realistically rendered animals and endearing characters.
Andreas Deja, a Disney animator who has brought such characters as Scar from "The Lion King" to life on screen, says the contemporary animators look upon the film with a sense of "awe."
"It is one of those films that has a very, very simple story. They focused on a very simple outline, and that gave animators a chance to really let the characters breathe and deal with each other and also have them come up with a sequence like Bambi and Thumper on the ice. It's totally character driven," Deja says.
Deja admits he was "curious how they would handle the restoration. I think there is a danger of over-restoring a film."
The TV ads and press materials do say the film is coming to "life as never before." But Bossert says that honoring the animators' original vision was the primary goal of the restoration.
"When they made the movie they did the best job they possibly could with the best technology at hand," he says. "But there were some issues. It wasn't their artistic intent to photograph dust into each frame. If they had had their way there wouldn't be any dust or dirt in the frame. We didn't set out to 'change or improve' the movie. What we set out to do was a restoration and a preservation."
