Bambi

A movie made more to show off animation skill than to tell a story. Plot, such as it is, is bare bones—just a pastiche of scenes of a life in the woods (the subtitle of the source book, by the way). In terms of story, this film starts off cloying and mostly stays that way. And yet...it cannot be entirely dismissed as a secondary work. For one thing, the artwork is a feast for the eyes—and visual appeal is one of the raisons d’etre of animation. Also, the film’s balance of sentimentality and realism is well handled, despite the inherent difficulty of squaring that circle. This entry in the Disney canon also echoes the company’s often overlooked (and and just as often parodied) dedication to films about the natural world; it is, in a sense, the foundational work of that part of the organization. Ultimately, this is a movie that succeeds despite the odds against it--perhaps not as the classic it's assumed to be, but as a good enough work in its own right.