146. Dumbo (1941)

Produced By Walt Disney

Synopsis

Dumbo is born, gets separated from his mother, learns to fly, becomes rich and gets mommy back.

Review

Dumbo is a very short film, almost exactly one hour long and it has a tale that is much more obscure than previous Disney films, it wasn't a well known story and probably because of that animators gave free rein to their imagination.

That is the best thing about this film, how imaginative it really is. Animators know no limits, up to the point of making the Pink Elephants On Parade section, one of the trippiest pieces of animation before the advent of LSD.

Another interesting thing in the film are its racial politics, Dumbo is ostracised by the other elephants by being born with larger ears (maybe he is an African elephant), he is seen as not a member of the "proud race" of Waspish elephant ladies. Eventually Dumbo is helped by a mouse representing the thing that elephants fear most and by the black crows, who are typical stereotypes of black people but who accept Dumbo and teach him how to fly by himself.

So all in all a very interesting film, not only because of the inventiveness of the animation but because of its quite subtle mentions of racism and prejudice.

Final Grade

9/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:


* At only 64 minutes, Dumbo is the shortest single segmented Disney animated feature.

* Credited as Timothy, the mouse is never mentioned by name in the actual film. However, his signature can be read on the contract in a newspaper photograph at the finale.

* There are no actual villains.

* Many of the artists who worked on the "Pink Elephants" segment were the younger artists at the studio who joined the picket line in May 1941 and eventually would become the nucleus of United Productions of America, the most influential animation studio of the 1950s.

* The "Pink Elephants On Parade" sequence depicts Dumbo and Timothy's drunken hallucinations. The sequence was the first venture into surrealism for a narrative Disney film, taking its cue from the experimental Fantasia. The sequence essentially breaks all of the "rules" that the Disney animators had lived by for creating realistic animation over the previous decade: pink, polka-dot, and plaid elephants dance, sing, and morph into a number of various objects. The design of the sequence is highly stylized. This sequence also heavily influenced the "Heffalumps and Woozles" sequence in The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which bears many similar traits.

* The "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence appeared in the Californian version of Disneyland's night-time show Fantasmic!.

* While trying to comfort Dumbo, Timothy says, "Lots of people with big ears are famous!" That's a joke of Walt Disney himself, who did in fact have big ears. Also, according to animation historian John Canemaker on the commentary track for the 2001 DVD release, audiences of 1941 recognized it as a humorous reference to actor Clark Gable.

* The name of the circus (seen on a sign as the train leaves the winter headquarters) is WDP Circus (Walt Disney Productions).

* When the movie was released, there was a concern that exposure to bright colors for prolonged periods of time might make the audience ill. The film was set in the world of a circus, and bright colors were essential to capturing the mood of the circus. To remedy this, Disney alternated sequences of bright colors with those of a darker tone, to give the audience a chance to recover.[citation needed]

* The sequence called Bathtime for Dumbo was one of the most memorable in the film. To create this scene and Dumbo's behavior, Bill Tytla got inspiration from his own 2-year-old daughter, Susan. He didn't base it on elephants as he claimed, "I don't know a damn thing about elephants".[citation needed]

* Dumbo has no spoken dialogue, much like Dopey in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Foulfellow's sidekick Gideon in Pinocchio.

* Dumbo's mother, Mrs. Jumbo, speaks only once when she says Dumbo's original name, "Jumbo, Jr."

* The human characters in the film are simplified most of the time to lend greater credibility to the animal characters. Circus workmen are kept in shadow, and the clowns are seen in silhouette when not in the circus ring. The sparse story and concise characters inspired a style in Dumbo that is predominantly visual.

* A large portion of Steven Spielberg's film 1941 involves some of the main characters (including General Stilwell) watching Dumbo in a theater. According to Spielberg, this event actually occurred in real life.

* With roughly a year and a half from script to screen, including the extensive strike during the making of the movie, this is the fastest production ever done from Walt Disney Feature Animation (WDFA).[citation needed]

* Dumbo makes an appearance in the popular Playstation 2 game Kingdom Hearts, in the form of a summon that the player can call upon in battle for aid.

* In season 4/5 of Family Guy in the episode "The Courtship of Stewie's Father" Peter and Stewie Griffin go to Disney World and Peter loses Stewie in the gift store. So Peter asks the crows from Dumbo where Stewie's gone. The crows reply "I've seen about everything, but I sure ain't seen your boy". Then Peter replies "Ahh, that's good old fashioned family racism".

* Dumbo II might have been put on hold.

* The scene where Dumbo blows square bubbles of alcohol-tinted water might have inspired the Carl Barks story Lost in the Andes where Huey, Dewey, and Louie blow square bubbles of chewing gum.

Pink Elephants On Parade: