Back when I was a child, there were no DVDs or even — and I know this will shock you all — any of those quaint things with rollers called video cassettes. Back then, if you wanted to see a movie that wasn’t playing in the theaters, an older movie, you had to wait for it to be revived, or until it was on TV. That’s how I saw Gone With the Wind: it’s my mother’s all-time favorite film, and she took me to one of its periodic revivals.

That’s how I became acquainted with Bambi as well, and Flower and Thumper and all the others — I saw it i revival sometime in the 50s or early sixties on the big screen. I remember crying at the death of Bambi’s mother, and thinking back, a lot of it was identification with the fawn. As we sat there in the dark, our own mothers by our side, it was all too easy to put ourselves in his place.

In “The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation,” Cambridge University Lecturer David Whitley, argues that Bambi also had the effect of raising environmental consciousness. In her N.Y. Times review of the book, Patricia Cohen notes that the film

was hailed by wildlife conservationists and denounced by hunters when it was released in 1942. An insult, declared Outdoor Life magazine, while the National Audubon Society compared its consciousness-raising power to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

In his book, Whitley argues that the beautiful, pastoral versions of nature in Disney cartoons like Bambi and Finding Nemo were instrumental in raising up generations of budding environmentalists. Agreeing, Cohen writes that

it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to see the nature-loving themes in Disney movies: hunters kill Bambi’s mother and burn down a forest; Pocahontas sings “The rainstorm and the river are my brothers/The heron and the otter are my friends/And we are all connected to each other.”

But many scholars have taken Disney to task on this very issue, citing the company for environmentally unfriendly policies and the films for candy-coated sentimentalism and distorted views of nature and animals.

And so, there’s a fine line being argued in academic circles: the beautiful, simplified visions in Disney animation, and in nature documentaries which aren’t always all that realistic, inspire environmental conservation on the one hand, but evoke unrealistically simplistic views, and thus solutions, on the other.

As an ex-biologist, I can see the point. In addition to the Disney animations, I also remember as a kid watching those insipid Disney documentaries where Jimmy Dean narrated in his folksy twang stuff like “Uh, oh . . . here comes Mr. Bahr . . . he figures he’s gonna have him some ra-coon supper . . .” And even in today’s much more realistic docs there can be a distressing tendency to humanize “our furry friends” in wholly unrealistic ways. (The latest being the unaccountably large number of movies about penguins).

By projecting our own motivations and fears and foibles on the natural world, especially its animal denizens, we think we understand them, that their motives are our motives. By assigning to them human feelings and thoughts we patronize them, rather than recognizing their innate “animal-ness,” rather than celebrating how they are different from us. Understanding the complex pack hierarchies that drives dog behavior is ultimately more satisfying, and more important to assuring their well-being, than projecting upon them human traits such as “love” or “loyalty.”

The inevitably distorted views of nature found in animated films and documentaries produce distorted environmental protection and advocacy efforts. Yet, is the damage caused greater than the awareness these films generate? Images after all do speak a thousand words, and the immersive, you-are-there quality of film can bring immediacy to a problem that all the printed words in the world could not.

And lest we forget, Bambi, Finding Nemo, and even March of the Penguins have intrinsic value as entertainments which, after all are their primary function. As consumers, we need to be just a little bit more discerning, a little more aware of where their depictions of our natural world might lead.