The educational screen (c1922-c1956])

Page 292 The Educational Screen Study of ''Bambi" Inspires Movie Adaptation PUBLIC School a Manhattan, in New York City, is one of the schools in the All Day Neigh- borhood School Demonstration, sponsored jointly by the New York City Board of Education and the Public Education Association. Six regular licensed teachers known as "group teach- ers," working with the regular class room teachers, are engaged in the exciting task of enriching an ex- periential curriculum. As far as possible, ^liss Ruth Gillette Hardy, principal of P.S. iZ, has tried to make Reproductions of colored drawings, made and titled by children, as follows: (Top) Bambi and Faline seen close together. (Center) Bambi and Faline. Stag coming near them. (Bottom) Bambi, big, on cliff, remembering. FREYDA NACQUE-ADLER All Day Neighborhood School P. S. 33, New York City, N. Y. Sixth graders prepare their version of the story, illustrated with hand-made slides, for primary grades. our curriculum evolve from important functional jobs known as "services." Thus it is that children at our schools run our milk service, take complete charge of operating our visual instruction program and run our reference and circulating library among other serv- ices needed to conduct a modern school. It is the sixth year class who ran the library serv- ice with whom this article is concerned. As part of the service to the school the children wanted to prepare story material for the younger classes. At first they simply wanted to adapt stories in simple vocabulary for the primary grades to read. However they soon wanted to augment this by a dramatic production.- Be- sides printing a longer story, they wanted to illustrate it with slides, use appropriate music, and present it at the primary assembly. Walt Disney's Bambi had been running at the neighborhood theatres and so the children decided to adapt this particular story. When I asked the class who the author of Bambi was they all came back with contemptuous surprise at teacher's ignorance and said "Disney, of course." I "wondered" whether this were really so and sug- gested they visit the library. They were quite amazed to discover that it was not Disney but Felix Salten, and that the original was written in German by an Austrian. 1 began to read the original to them and was not allowed to stop, so fascinated were they. As I only had one-half of the class for one hour twice or three times a week, (the rest of the class ran the library under the guidance of their teacher) the children got impatient waiting for me to read to them. Soon twenty-cent editions of Salten made their appearance and the children were finishing the novel on their own. Much to my surprise the children without ex- ception preferred the Salten to the Disney version. Some felt Disney had spoiled Bambi. When questioned as to why, these were some of their responses. "Salten makes you want to cry for the deer." "Dis- ney had all that dopey love-stuff." (This is interesting, as one of the most poetic parts of Salten's book is his treatment of the love relationship between,Faline and Bambi) "Bambi is a sad story and Disney makes it funny." This led to many discussions on th*M>roblems movie script writers faced in adapting original stories. How telling a story was different from showing it on the screen. How some things were better written than (Condudcifvn page 302) * This demonstration was given under the auspices of the Visual Instruction Section of the N. Y. Society for the E.xperimental Study of Education—Chairman, Esther T..' Berg.