THE POWER OF `BAMBI'.

He went on to become one of Walt Disney's legendary ``nine old men,'' a group of favored artists who worked on the now-classic feature films that built the Mouse empire.

But when Marc Davis started drawing cute-faced animals in the late 1930s, he was only an apprentice animator helping out with ``Snow White.''

His drawings so impressed Disney that he promoted Davis to full animator and set him to work on ``Bambi.''

On the eve of the release of a special collector's video edition of ``Bambi,'' Davis remains as proud of his little deer as the day he first drew him.

``I like Bambi,'' says Davis, 83, a resident of the Silver Lake area. ``We did a good job on it. It was a big jump ahead because our animals came to life in a way they're not quite up to doing today.

``Our animals had bones and muscles, and when the mouth worked the eyes worked. It's something I miss in present-day animation.''

The 55th anniversary edition of ``Bambi,'' which hits stores today, includes a restored version of the 67-minute film, current interviews with animators and vintage, behind-the-scenes footage of ``Bambi'' during production. Priced at $26.99, the package also contains a commemorative booklet called ``The Magic of Bambi.''

It's been seven years since ``Bambi'' was available for purchase, and Disney publicists say the commemorative video will only be on the market for 55 days.

For Davis, a native Californian who joined Disney in 1935 and retired 43 years later, the early days of animation were thrilling.

``It was a young man's dream,'' he says wistfully. ``At the bottom of the Depression, nobody was hiring artists. Most animators were unsuccessful newspaper cartoonists, not necessarily artists in the fine-arts sense.

``But Disney was advertising that he wanted artists. He knew he was doing something different.''

``Bambi,'' Disney's fifth full-length feature, showcased not only Davis' mastery of ``personality animation'' but Asian watercolor techniques by Tyrus Wong, who created the forest backgrounds.

``Bambi is kind of a special film,'' Davis says.

It was also the first Disney film in which a character experienced real death, as opposed to fantasy or fairy-tale death, which can always be reversed. When Bambi's mother is killed by a hunter, no pixie dust wakes her up.

Despite the film's strong anti-hunting message, Davis says the film stirred little controversy when it was released in 1942.

``Things were a lot different in that time,'' he said.

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Photo: ``We did a good job on it. It was a big jump ahead because our animals came to life in a way they're not quite up to doing today,'' animator Marc Davis says of 1942's ``Bambi.''