Bambi is a 1942 American animated drama film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. The fifth Disney animated feature film, it is based on the 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods by Austrian author and hunter Felix Salten.[4][5] The film was produced by Walt Disney and directed by David Hand and a team of sequence directors.

The main characters are Bambi, a white-tailed deer; his parents (the Great Prince of the forest and his unnamed mother); his friends Thumper (a pink-nosed rabbit); and Flower (a skunk); and his childhood friend and future mate, Faline. In the original book, Bambi was a roe deer, a species native to Europe; but Disney decided to base the character on a mule deer from Arrowhead, California.[6][7][8] Illustrator Maurice "Jake" Day convinced Disney that the mule deer had large "mule-like" ears and were more common to western North America; but that the white-tail deer was more recognized throughout America.[9]

The film received three Academy Award nominations: Best Sound (Sam Slyfield), Best Song (for "Love Is a Song" sung by Donald Novis) and Original Music Score.[10]

In June 2008, the American Film Institute presented a list of its "10 Top 10"—the best ten films in each of ten classic American film genres—after polling over 1,500 people from the creative community. Bambi placed third in animation.[11] In December 2011, the film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant".[12][13][14]

In January 2020, it was announced that a photorealistic computer-animated remake was in development.