Felix Salten was born in Budapest on this day in 1869, and the family moved to Vienna while he was still an infant. He grew up to be a critic, which is a way of saying he read for a living and wrote fast for newspapers, and in 1923 he published a book he did not think of as a children's book at all: Bambi, ein Leben im Walde. It had run first in a Vienna paper, and it went out into the world as a novel for adults \u2014 a forest seen from inside it, with the deer as the ones who have to think about weather and hunger and the season for guns.\n\nThe first English translation, in 1928, was made by a young man named Whittaker Chambers, who would later be known for something else entirely. That is one of the pleasant accidents of the trade: a book crosses a language because somebody needed the work. Fourteen years after that, Disney's film gave the name to everyone, and the novel quietly became the thing people assume they have read.\n\nIn 1936 the Nazi regime banned it. Salten was Jewish; the book was read as being about more than deer, and he lost his Vienna and finished his life in Switzerland, dying in 1945. I keep whichever edition comes through the door. They price the same on my shelf, which Marguerite tells me is not really pricing.
Jun, the 1942 film runs only about seventy minutes and lost money on its first release \u2014 wartime had shut most of Europe to it. It made its money back on the reissues, decades of them, which is the kindest thing a projectionist can say about a picture.
Jun, the forest everyone pictures came largely from Tyrus Wong, who painted it in watercolour: detail at the edges of the sheet, the middle left soft and open, so the eye fills in the trees. A Chinese-American artist working in a back room, and the whole mood of the film is his brush.