New live-animal 'Bambi' film by Michel Fessler hits French cinemas October 2024

A new live-action film adaptation of Felix Salten's 1923 novel 'Bambi, l'histoire d'une vie dans les bois' directed by Michel Fessler will be released in French cinemas on October 16, 2024. The film, narrated by singer Mylène Farmer, is produced by MC4 and Gebeka Films in co-production with Kinology. It follows a fawn from birth to adulthood, depicting the tragic loss of its mother to hunters, friendships with a crow, rabbit, and raccoon, and encounters with a mate and a majestic stag father. Fessler, known for co-writing 'March of the Penguins' (2005) and 'Le Petit Nicolas', returns to nature and children's stories as director. Farmer described the film as 'absolutely beautiful... an ode to nature, a magical parenthesis in this brutal world. The emotion is palpable throughout.' The production took two years, filmed in French forests with real animals. Meanwhile, a horror film titled 'Bambi: The Reckoning' directed by Dan Allen is scheduled for 2025, exploiting childhood trauma from the 1942 Disney animated classic directed by David Hand. That cartoon was added to the US National Film Registry in 2011. The original Disney film's emotional impact gave rise to psychological phenomena: the 'Bambi Effect' (minimizing death of less aesthetically pleasing animals) and 'Bambi Syndrome' (hypersensitivity to animal fate).