7. Those horrified by the (decades-old spoiler alert!) early death of Bambi’s mother aren’t alone. Diane Disney complained to her dad about the inclusion only to be told he was following the narration of the book, Bambi: A Life in the Woods. In response, she pointed out the liberties he’d taken in the past.
8. To get the life story of a fawn just right, animators watched nature films, took field trips to the Los Angeles Zoo, studied the movements of two deer donated to the studio and, in the biggest show of commitment, observed the decomposition of a dead deer.
9. After accepting what would be the role of his lifetime at age 6, Donnie Dunagan, the voice of Bambi, went on to join the Marines and serve in the Vietnam War. Taking pains to never talk about his brush with fame (“Most of the image in people’s minds of Bambi was a little frail deer, not doing very well, sliding around on the ice on his belly,” he noted to NPR’s StoryCorps) it came up when he was just weeks away from retirement as he respectfully told a general he didn’t have time to complete an assigned task.
“He looked at me, pulled his glasses down like some kind of college professor,” he recalled. “There’s a big, red, top-secret folder that he got out of some safe somewhere that had my name on it. He pats this folder, looks me in the eye and says, ‘You will audit the auditors. Won’t you, Maj. Bambi?'”