Trivia / Bambi II

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Patrick Stewart, who is a big animation fan (and a Bambi fan himself) and had spent years trying to land a role in a Disney movie, practically jumped at the chance to play The Great Prince of the Forest in this film.
• Billing Displacement: Bambi, despite being The Hero, is billed second under the Great Prince in the end credits.
• B-Team Sequel: Like all of the other direct-to-video Disney sequels, this film was handled by Disney's sub studio, Disneytoon Studios, rather than by Disney's in-house animation department, though some veteran Disney staff such as Andreas Deja and Brian Pimental did head the project. Of course due to the 64 year Sequel Gap, it wasn't like they could rehire most of the team from the original film anyway.
• Children Voicing Children: Like the original movie, they used actual kid actors to voice Bambi and most his friends (Faline being the lone exception, as Andrea Bowen was already in her mid-teens when she voiced her).
• Creator Backlash:
  • Downplayed with Andreas Deja, since he did enjoy the experience and was impressed by the level of effort put into the story and animation by Brian Pimental's team, but still thought the very concept of a sequel to Bambi (a film he himself held dearly) was extremely questionable. He also recounts a conversation he had with Pimental that implied there were more than few others within the production who had a similar stance.
  • Animator Andreas Wessel-Therhorn doesn't regret working on the film either, but he felt the film was much better in the animatic stage, where they used the score of the original Bambi as temp tracks—while he liked Bruce Broughton's instrumental score for the final film, he felt the pop songs were terrible.
• Cut Song: The soundtrack has a cut song "Sing the Day" that was supposed to play over the main trio's "being brave" montage. The blu-ray includes a storyboarded version of how the scene would have originally played out with the song.
• Descended Creator: Director Brian Pimental voices the Groundhog and Porcupine characters.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Unlike the fate that many of the other direct-to-video Disney sequels have fallen into, this is surprisingly not the case with this film, as Disney still keeps the film in print and has rereleased it on Blu-ray as recent as 2017, albiet as a Disney Movie Club exclusive.
• No Export for You: Interestingly, Bambi II happened to be released theatrically in many territories in Europe, but in territories including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Taiwan, China and Japan, the film was a direct-to-video release for whatever reason.
• The Other Darrin: Naturally due to the six decade gap between the two films, every character in the original had a new voice actor in Bambi II (besides some stock audio at the very start of the film).
• Promoted Fanboy: Several of the creative team who worked on Bambi II stated this disposition in the "Making Of" documentary. Patrick Stewart, an acclaimed theatrical actor, claimed there was nothing more emotionally intense than Bambi, while animation supervisor Andreas Deja considered the original so perfect that he only agreed to do the sequel if it met his standard of quality.
• Refitted for Sequel: Several story elements are lifted or are loosely inspired by either the original Felix Salten novel or his sequel novel Bambi's Children.
  • The scene where the Great Prince saves Bambi from a deer call trap by hunters is loosely taken from the original novel (though the timeline is regressed to fit, in the novel Bambi was already a buck and mistook the call for Faline's voice).
  • Ronno's portrayal in this film was heavily inspired by his appearance in Osamu Tezuka's manga adaptation of Bambi (which portrayed Ronno as a bullying fawn decades before the midquel did) as well as the character of Boso, Geno's spitefully jealous to the point of bullying cousin, from Bambi's Children (but whereas Boso eventually reconciled with Geno as adults, Bambi and Ronno are at odds as soon as they meet as fawns and stay that way into adulthood).
  • The ornery porcupine is based off of an encounter Geno had with just such an animal in Bambi's Children, with his design being lifted right from another (ironically more friendly) porcupine in the storybook Bambi: Friends of the Forest.
• Sequel Gap: This film currently holds the record for longest sequel gap between films, a mind-blowing 64 years after the first film... and it isn't even a sequel, it's a midquel!
• What Could Have Been:
  • It was implied in early announcements that Man (credited as "The Man Of The Forest") would be given a more substantial presence in the film, with it even being rumoured that Christopher Lee would provide his voice. The character ultimately remains the same unseen threat that he was in the original.
  • The trio's "Being Brave" montage had a song written to play over it called "Sing the Day" that was cut. Storyboards show that the scene was meant to run slightly longer due to the song as well.
• Working Title: Bambi II was initially titled Bambi and The Great Prince during early stages of production, and even lengthened to Bambi and the Great Prince of the Forest in later stages. The latter title even made it into some early commercials and merchandise.

---