The beautiful artistry in this1942 masterpiece about the cycle of birth and death has been restored in today’s new release of Bambi on DVD. All Bambi images © Disney. All rights reserved.

With today’s important release of Bambi on DVD, Disney inaugurates a new digital restoration/preservation program, allowing us to view this and other early classics at home with unprecedented sharpness and clarity. “I was blown away… you see the cel shadows and ink lines,” beamed famed Disney artist Andreas Deja, who supervised The Lion King’s Scar, and is working on the DVD sequel, Bambi and the Great Prince of the Forest. Indeed, from the darkly elegant opening in the forest to Bambi’s ill-fated attempt to skate on ice with Thumper, the rabbit, to the blazing fire that terrorizes the friendly forest creatures and nearly destroys their home, you can see more of the beautiful artistry that went into this sublime 1942 masterpiece about the natural cycle of birth and death that stood as Walt Disney’s own personal favorite among his beloved animated features.

As the DVD market begins its slow transition to high-def at the end of the year and with the ever-growing sophistication of digital technology, Disney decided to embark on a new restoration/preservation program a year-and-a-half ago to better present its esteemed animation library. The studio enlisted Steve Poehlein to spearhead the Bambi project as director of mastering and restoration. The first thing he did was assemble a team of film, computer and animation experts from Feature Animation and Studio New Technology and Worldwide Technical Services, including effects animator/visual effects supervisor/director Dave Bossert as artistic director.

Steve Poehlein (left) spearheaded the Bambi project as director of mastering and restoration while Dave Bossert was tapped as artistic director of the project.

The first step was inspecting the original nitrate camera negative at the Library of Congress. Fortunately, Bambi’s original film element was in great shape. As animation aficionados are well aware, before the advent of color negative in the early 1950s, animation was photographed on special black-and-white film, with each drawing shot three times by the animation camera on to successive frames through a color wheel containing three filters — red, green and blue. Then the negative was shipped to the studio in Burbank, where it was inspected and digitally scanned to capture every subtle nuance. “We wanted the best possible imagery off that negative because we probably won’t touch it again,” Poehlein asserts. “Eventually, it will literally disintegrate. When we put up the raw scanned images, everyone was astounded at the clarity of the images and the detail of the brush work that no one ever saw because of the imperfections in the optical printing process.” The black-and-white files were then combined and registered to create each final color frame with a proprietary program similar to Warner Bros.’ Ultra-Resolution software designed for three-strip Technicolor features (Gone with the Wind).

“We actually did some tests with the Warner Bros. process, but ultimately there were some issues that led us down a different path, so we developed our own technology,” Bossert explains. “It allows you to take 20-30 targets on each frame and line up the three frames exactly. The interesting thing is that because we have all three color records on one strip of negative, we are in a much more advantageous position than the three-strip process, where you have three negatives aging at different rates and multiple registration problems.”