I gave a lot of grief to Dumbo for being a short that as stretched out to a full-length movie, but at the very least Dumbo felt like an actual story. Bambi is probably my least favorite Disney movie, and that is by and large because you don't get a full story. What you get is a string of highlights of the life of a dear named Bambi. From his childhood to being a father, you get to see all kinds of things in his life.
The problem is absolutely none of them are interesting, and none of them feel like they hold any real weight. I am going to cut right to the most famous scene from this movie so.... spoilers if you somehow don't know about it already. There is a scene where Bambi's mother gets shot by a hunter. After this scene, Bambi's mother is never mentioned again, his personality doesn't seem to be affected, and Bambi never once things back on his mother for the rest of the story. It's weird to say this, but Disney is one of the oldest examples I know of a death that happens almost purely for the sake of shock while adding nothing to the story.
What I think Disney was trying to do with Bambi was apply all the great animations they were capable of and rather than creating a spectacle they wanted to apply it to something far more simple and putting the focus on something else. The problem is they chose to use animation to portray the life of a dear, and as it turns out the life of a deer is actually incredibly dull.
Another issue that comes along with this movie is the way the characters are portrayed. It's not that they are all incredibly uninteresting, which they definitely are, and that they don't have any meaningful character arcs, which they don't, it's that weird mix of trying to make them seem human by having them talk like humans and react like humans. But the things that happen are still distinctly animalistic. The part I want to draw attention too is when Bambi meets up with a deer he met as a child, and now she seems romantically interested in him. As soon as they meet up, a new deer shows up to claim her so he and Bambi do that whole fight with the horns to see who gets the girl. Were they just animals, sure it makes sense, but with how humanized the show tries to make them the whole thing just feels... awkward.
I will say one part of the film I like is when the Owl is woken up by the happy birds singing and goes off on how all of this is stupid and he's getting out of there. I liked this part because I could relate to this own, I could feel his pain. This is all stupid, and I want to get out of there. This being my favorite part of the movie is not a good sign.
In the end, it's a movie that is just stuff happening in the life of a dear. While the animation is great, it's not in service of anything interesting or grand like it had been in previous Disney movies. Nothing that happens feels like it has any real consequence, and as a result of these things you are left with a movie that doesn't have anything at all to offer.