How 'Bambi' Traumatized a Generation

We’re sorry. You’re going to watch the clip above from American Experience: Walt Disney, the two-part film premiering Sept. 14 on PBS that explores the life and legacy of the man who defined childhoods, and remember how Bambi scarred yours.

When Bambi was released in August 1942, the narrator of the four-hour film explains, it was the most ambitious feature-length film in the studio’s history: “an artist’s rendering of the natural world — in all its beauty and peril.”

The clip shows the scene in which Bambi and his mother are enjoying a spot of new spring grass when she hears the rustling of a nearby hunter. She tells Bambi to run back to their thicket and not look back. “We made it! We made it, mother!” he says. But she’s not there to answer.

Bambi ventures out to look for his mother calling, “Mother!… Mother, where are you?“ As Don Hahn, who produced Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, says in the film, "A generation was — and still is— traumatized by that moment in Bambi… It’s done almost in pantomime with the snow falling… Fearless filmmaking. Absolute fearlessness.”

American Experience: Walt Disney premieres Sept. 14 and Sept. 15 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check your local listings).