The original “Bambi” • Hacker News Board

Re: The original “Bambi”

#111

Post by bashmelek » Thu, May 05, 2022, 3:40 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #88

brobdingnagians wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been split on this. On the one hand it is a bit unpleasant and can be traumatizing, and we tend to shy away from unpleasant things, but on the other hand lots of generations grew up on Grimm's Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and learned a bit about how difficult life can be and the consequences of moral failings or lack of hard work. It is important to prepare children for the fact that life…

I don't mind scary stories for children, especially when told by people who know those kids and can easily judge the effect. But, the generations growing up on that and them taking deep moral lessons from it point is overstated. They were collected or written and then popular collections of folklore in some part of last century. They are not exactly bible, many of those stories don't even have some kind of moral less…

This is something I wish was brought up more. It is almost a meme that “the originals were darker,” but really the famous tales of the Grimms and Perrault et al are just local snapshots of a living tradition of the common people telling stories. I suppose the focus on the older recorded versions is a reaction against Disney and modified versions of stories marketed to children (e.g. Lang perhaps). And to be clear, I think all these, including Disney, are important culturally and present fine variants of the stories. Still, I don’t want us to forget the others.

Digging a little deeper, you find tons of variants of stories, and discover all sorts of new ones, hybrids, seemingly incomplete ones, different levels of embellishment, darker and lighter. And some do have morals, but a lot of them are just things happening. Some motifs just seem to stick. And folk tales were not primarily meant for children either—we tell kids campfire ghost stories all the time, and don’t think so much on what they teach. We just like them.

Re: The original “Bambi”

#112

Post by Johnny555 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 3:43 PM UTC

As jarring as Bambi was as a child, as an adult, the opening to Pixar's "Up" is far more heart wrenching.

Re: The original “Bambi”

#113

Post by dimensionc132 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 3:45 PM UTC

Semaphor wrote: post #23

senko wrote: post #6

Yes, Bambi is an utterly depressing story. Most original material Disney adapted was bleakier and more grisly than the adaptation. Most of the tales collected by brothers Grimm would today be horror stories. (Did you know that Cinderella's evil stepsisters had their toes and heels cut off so they could fit in the slippers? Or that the ravens pecked their eyes as punishment? Or that Maleficent ends up in a boiling cau…

The Brothers Grimm already toned the horror down. Sleeping Beauty was based on a tale called Sun, Moon, and Talia [0] which has the prince having sex and impregnating her while she sleeps, and she only wakes up from her newborns sucking the splint out of her finger when she can’t find the breast. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun,_Moon,_and_Talia

Sun, Moon, and Talia (Italian: Sole, Luna, e Talia) is an Italian literary fairy tale written by Giambattista Basile in his 1634

Guy was high on some drugs when he wrote this sh%t. Talk about messed up.

Re: The original “Bambi”

#114

Post by PeterisP » Thu, May 05, 2022, 3:46 PM UTC

sentrysapper wrote: post #5

brobdingnagians wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been split on this. On the one hand it is a bit unpleasant and can be traumatizing, and we tend to shy away from unpleasant things, but on the other hand lots of generations grew up on Grimm's Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and learned a bit about how difficult life can be and the consequences of moral failings or lack of hard work. It is important to prepare children for the fact that life…

Life will give those hard lessons out for free - why build a curriculum for it?

Quite on the contrary, life may make you pay a very horrific cost for learning that lesson on your own instead of from the mistakes of others.

Re: The original “Bambi”

#115

Post by dimensionc132 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

In Germany it is not uncommon, or it was not uncommon when i was a child, for parents to read horror stories to their children; Der Struwelpeter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struwwelpeter

Scared the living crap out of me, especially the story of Die gar traurige Geschichte mit dem Feuerzeug ("The Very Sad Tale with the Matches"): A girl plays with matches, accidentally ignites herself and burns to death.

Re: The original “Bambi”

#116

Post by verisimi » Thu, May 05, 2022, 3:55 PM UTC

photochemsyn wrote: post #64

For some reason I got my hands on George Orwell's "Animal Farm" at a very young age, as it looked like a kid's book. That's a fairly bleak book, for example when the pigs sell the draft horse to the glue factory, but only the goat (whose only friend is the horse) knows what's going on. Watership Down is another good one, the character of the Black Rabbit of Inle (the Grim Reaper of rabbitkind) was memorable. However…

> However I disagree with claims that these kind of works 'traumatize' young readers.

Yes, the trauma occurs when you realise how misled you were about the nature of reality, that you were sold a lie.

Re: The original “Bambi”

#117

Post by aidenn0 » Thu, May 05, 2022, 3:58 PM UTC

Johnny555 wrote: post #112

As jarring as Bambi was as a child, as an adult, the opening to Pixar's "Up" is far more heart wrenching.

A large fraction of Pixar's output includes scenes that prompt a small child to ask "Why are you crying mommy/daddy?"

Re: The original “Bambi”

#118

Post by boredumb » Thu, May 05, 2022, 4:03 PM UTC

This is the most insufferable thing I've ever read in my entire life. This reads like chocolate cake with chocolate icing drizzled in chocolate syrup for smug individuals to read from the backseat of a private car service. The amount of faux insights and pop politic buzzwords while ending this with questions of whether bambi is a parable for jewish existence is astonishing and I found myself wondering if this was a parody paper submitted to the New Yorker to trick an editor into publishing it.

Re: The original “Bambi”

#119

Post by mrob » Thu, May 05, 2022, 4:05 PM UTC

pram wrote: post #74

vanderZwan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was once called „that animals cartoon that traumatised generations”. Although I can imagine this being quite horrific, I also don't recall that this cartoon was all that upsetting me when I watched it as a child. Then again I grew up in the countryside so maybe it was less shocking to me because I already knew what nature was like. When it comes to animal cartoons I think Watership Down and The Plague Dogs were…

The Plague Dogs is so unrelentingly bleak, few films have the spine to just be utterly hopeless. It's like a "children's" version of something like Threads or The Lighthouse lol

I recently read an interpretation of the ending that seems plausible and makes it slightly less bleak. Rot13 for spoilers:

Va gur crahygvzngr fprar, lbh frr gur ohyyrgf fgevxr gur jngre, naq gura gur uryvpbcgre snqrf bhg. Guvf pbhyq vzcyl gung gurl uvg gurve gnetrgf naq erghearq gb onfr, juvpu zrnaf gur svany fprar vf fbzr xvaq bs nsgreyvsr, naq abg gur qbtf' qlvat qryhfvbaf nf gurl qebja nf V svefg nffhzrq. Gur zlgubybtvpny fprarf va Jngrefuvc Qbja ner n cerprqrag gb guvf xvaq bs guvat, fb vg qbrfa'g fbhaq haernfbanoyr.

Re: The original “Bambi”

#120

Post by paulmd » Thu, May 05, 2022, 4:06 PM UTC

bsenftner wrote: post #91

photochemsyn wrote: post #64

For some reason I got my hands on George Orwell's "Animal Farm" at a very young age, as it looked like a kid's book. That's a fairly bleak book, for example when the pigs sell the draft horse to the glue factory, but only the goat (whose only friend is the horse) knows what's going on. Watership Down is another good one, the character of the Black Rabbit of Inle (the Grim Reaper of rabbitkind) was memorable. However…

I was a fat, stuttering early elementary kid, so I read a lot to avoid the cruel other kids. To the degree my 4th grade teacher would no longer allow me to do book reports for a grade using children's or teen books any longer. She pointed me at the literature classics and said only those were grade worthy at my reading skill. The right there was on of the most instrumental decisions of my life. By 5th grade I'd read…

haha, high-five. My parents read with us every night as a kid, and that got me going on my own. At the start of third grade I did a book report on a junior textbook about the allied air campaigns during ww2 and the teacher didn't really know what to do with that.

(I'm a smart guy but reading with my parents made a huge difference imo, it is probably the single biggest thing you can do to give your kids a head-start in life. Give your kids the ability to sponge up as much information as possible during those critical years of childhood brain plasticity!)

I've always been a sensitive person (until cruel kids taught me to hide it) and Watership Down and Where The Red Fern Grows got me bad as a kid... but not like lifelong trauma or anything, just baby's first exposure to death.