Perfection

Just got my hands on the DVD release of Bambi, which, if you haven't seen it, you really ought to, because, as far as I'm concerned, it's one of the greatest achievements of world cinema.
Only seventy minutes long, less than a thousand words of dialogue, an invisible antagonist that doesn't put in even a surrogate appearance until twenty minutes into the movie and yet it creates an absolutely involving world of vivid, memorable characters that works as well today as it did fifty years ago.
What was especially interesting was what they included as a commentary track which consisted of a contemporary audio dramatization derived from transcriptions of actual story meetings of Walt Disney and his staff during the making of the movie where they discussed everything from the naming of the subsidiary characters, whether or not "Man" should be seen, and to what extent, whether we should see Bambi's shot (apparently, as originally conceived, we not only saw Bambi's mother shot, but the young Bambi was also shot and wounded as the scene was originally conceived), how music was conceived, throughout the process, as integral to the finished film and also, at every stage, how the final decisions tended toward the direction of implying rather than rendering things explicitly that to do so would make the final product better, the emotion stronger.
These days it is pro forma (and not without justification) to knock the development process as our experience as writers so often is that it goes wrong so badly. And yet here we have so vivid an example of how that story development process, handled correctly, can yield a work of supreme artistic brilliance.
On the depressing side, the DVD also provided a preview for of all things a Bambi sequel detailing the young Bambi's adventures when he goes off with his Dad after his Mom gets shot which will, I'm prepared to bet, be absolutely dreadful, as it is clear from the footage that they showed that they have yielded to the temptation properly resisted in the original to make Dad into a sympathetic character. Not only that, they have the young Bambi meet up with Thumper and Flower on his new adventures which makes no sense at all, since when he meets up with them when he gets back in the original, Thumper says, "Hey, remember me?" because they haven't seen him since he went away either.
Oh, well.
NMS