In the Pics section, film critic Floortje Smit takes a look at contemporary visual culture.
A new Bambi is coming. No, it’s not what you think. Disney has not dusted off the old furniture and hired an army of computer animation experts to make the deer dart lifelike across the cinema screen, plus a hip young screenwriter who has to sell the heart-conquering animal to a new generation. This Bambi is, according to low-budget director Scott Jeffrey, “rabid” and “one sadistic killing machine who hides in the wilderness’.
At Disney they can’t laugh about it. The film studio is known for being extremely protective of its heritage, but is now running into a problem: the rights of the stories on which they based their iconic films are released. Bambi: The Reckoning (planned release: Valentine’s Day next year) is based on a book from 1923, and after a hundred years it belongs to the ‘public domain’. This is also the reason that director Rhys Waterfield can currently put the finishing touches to the slasher Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. In that film, Pooh and Piglet take bloody revenge on humanity for being abandoned by Christopher Robin (always a bit of a jerk), which means, for example, attacking unsuspecting women in bikinis with chains and heavy objects.
Bambi, Pooh, Peter Pan (also in the works): they are, of course, cut out for horror. The genre often puts a creepy spin on everything that was supposed to be comforting in childhood, but perhaps wasn’t always: clowns, dolls, and so on. It plays on the childhood fantasy and/or fear that inanimate things can come to life. That is why the genre is and remains so popular among teenagers: seeing your childhood heroes return as killing machines is actually a beautiful and safe rite of passage, with which you say goodbye to your youth and steam on to adulthood.
It is a matter of caution for the makers to avoid all pending copyright issues and trademarks slalom. The red shirt of the bear, for example, comes from Disney, so the Blood and Honey-Pooh has a lumberjack coat on. And you can’t see Tigger, because she’s still protected. But reading between the lines, the Disney legacy is of course the reason this works at all: not turning every children’s book from the early 20th century into a horror film is automatically funny.
How long such a gimmick remains fun is of course the question, and whether you really get the audience into a cinema with such a joke. And let’s be honest: it can never get more traumatizing than Disney’s own dying mother deer.