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I'll have to come clean and admit something: as a child I never watched Bambi. My head and heart were captured by outer space and Star Wars, and the cartoons I grew up watching were old Looney Tunes and Woody Woodpecker shows. Instead of crying over that most infamous of moments in Bambi (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, then I won't be the one to spoil you now), I cried over Bruce Dern blowing up the Valley Forge at the end of Silent Running.

It was only later in life, as a teenager, that I started understanding the legacy of the old school Disney animated films. By the time I caught Dumbo on television, I knew all about the scene where his mother could only caress her baby elephant through the bars of her cage -- but that didn't stop the gravity of that scene from playing out with my emotions. The animators that worked at Disney in its first golden age, in the 1930s and 1940s, knew the nuance of how to tell a story. It's something that was rediscovered during Disney's second golden age of animation beginning with The Little Mermaid, and onward with the era of Pixar films.

With Bambi: Diamond Edition, Walt Disney has given the 70 year old movie an incredible visual and audio clean-up. Watching the film in 2011, and with fresh eyes, it's amazing to see how clean this cartoon is on Blu-ray. The colors of the forest, the brooks that Bambi and his forest friends cavort in, the brown fur of the little deer, the soft creamy yellows and blues of flowers, they look astonishing on high definition television. It's an impressive feat of engineering to restore this film and present it this way.

When weighed against today's modern story narrative, the tale told in Bambi likely comes across as too simplistic. Bambi and his furry friends enjoy the magic of the forest, of discovering each other's friendship and having laughs as they grow up. That's why when the tragedy that intrudes on Bambi's takes place, it thunders into the movie and wipes away that magical feeling you had. This may be a movie made in a simpler time, but if you believe as I did that it means the weight of life's hardness isn't felt, then that's an error Bambi doesn't let slip by you. When that awful scene plays out the horror and revulsion one feels today is likely as much as it was when the movie premiered in 1943, when America was knee-deep in the trauma of the Second World War.

Disney has a number of bonus features on the two-disc set. The biggest is the hour-long "Making of Bambi" which features interviews with today's animators and an examination of the development process that went into Disney's fifth animated feature. "Inside Walt's Story Meetings" is a feature-length documentary that runs concurrently with the movie, providing narrative and images you watch picture-within-picture. You can also stop watching the movie and go branch off and watch a deeper part of the examination, like a reenactment of a story meeting Walt Disney had during Bambi's production. Apparently you can watch both shows at the same time if you have an iPad, something that I couldn't try out within my own household.

Two unfinished deleted scenes and a deleted song; an interactive game; production galleries, storyboard and imagery; a 1937 animated short titled "The Old Mill"; the film's trailer; and a new introduction by Diane Disney Miller, Walt's daughter, are also here. There's enough to keep anyone interested in classical animation, or someone who remembers this film fondly from their youth and wants to know more about its' creation, entertained for two to four more hours.

Speaking as a newcomer to the audience, Bambi: Diamond Edition is an excellent addition to your family's DVD library. You could draw a line from Finding Nemo all the way back to this movie, and now that I've been able to understand it myself, I can understand the impact this film had on so many.

Buy Bambi: Diamond Edition (Two-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo)

Review Score: 80 / 100