User blog comment:That Epic/Disney Movie Ranking!/@comment-1874924-20140524044151

Bambi is mainly visual, and is best appreciated on that basis. The whole film has less than 1,000 words of dialogue, but introduced a revolutionary animation technology: a multi-plane camera that makes the forest look 3-D in pan shots. When a certain authority (The American Film Institute, if memory serves) ranked the greatest movie villians of all time, Bambi's unseen "Man" came in at #2.

Having read the novel won't probably won't ruin the movie for most people, but the novel is far darker. To take an analogy from this very wiki, if you compare the tone of LTDI to that of TDI, you'll have a fair idea of the tone difference between Bambi the novel and Bambi the film. Enhancing the analogy is that the novel (as translated into English by Whittaker Chambers) is one of the works that influenced my writing style.