by Stephen Russell-Gebbett
“Fixing a Hole” is a series whose sole purpose is to review films that have not yet been covered on Wonders in the Dark. The theme for November is “Animated Animals.”
While Joel has selected all the titles, certain films have been assigned to guest writers. This week Checking on My Sausages‘ Stephen, who conducted the Animation Countdown on Wonders in the Dark, takes a look at the pros and cons of Disney’s 1941 cartoon.
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Dumbo (1941/United States/directed by Samuel Armstrong, Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen)
stars the voices of Edward Brophy, Sterling Holloway, Cliff Edwards, Herman Bing
written by Joe Grant, Dick Huemer, Otto Englander, Bill Peet, Aurelius Battaglia, Joe Rinaldi, Vernon Stallings, Webb Smith from the book by Helen Aberson, Harold Pearl • music by Frank Churchill, Oliver Wallace • animation department: Art Babbitt, James Bodrero, Ward Kimbell, John Lounesbury, John P. Miller, Maurice Noble, Elmer Plummer, Martin Provenson, Woolie Reitherman, Vladimir Tytla, John Walbridge, Frank Thomas, and others • produced by Walt Disney
The Story: Dumbo, an elephant with big ears, is born to a circus animal. Shunned by the rest of the herd (“his disgrace is our own shame”), he is mocked and ridiculed by man and beast alike. Mrs. Jumbo, his mother, is whipped and caged for trying to protect her child. Separated from her, a sad Dumbo tries, with the help of a mouse and a band of crows, to get by in the circus business and find a way to be reunited with his mother.
Maybe those ears, those very things that held him down, will carry him up and up…
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The character of Dumbo, the elephant who can (spoilers ahead) fly, is said to have been inspired by a comic strip on the back of a cereal box. Dumbo the story is itself a brief and simple sketch, but one hour long. The style is simple too, recalling the animations of pioneer Winsor McCay (Gertie the Dinosaur) in both line and movement. After the flamboyant excesses, and financial losses, of Fantasia, Dumbo is Disney pared down and relatively unassuming.
The opening scene in which the animals board a (anthropomorphised) train, is as colourful as a nursery and has a curiosity and energy that is quite different from the sickly nannying charm offensive that afflicts many Disney films. It is during this journey a stork delivers a child to Mrs.Jumbo. The train choo choos through the landscape and as it grinds to a halt at its destination, the music too slows down to a stop. It’s fun.
Once the characters are properly introduced and the story gets going, this energy becomes trying when applied to every situation and almost every animal and person. It’s all big. There are quite a lot of children’s films that think that, to be enjoyed by children, everybody in them has to act like a child or a fool. It is like the adult who leans into the pram and goes “coochy-coo!”.
Stories for children have always been filled with caricature. Exaggerations of traits can be stereotyping. It applies to everything in the film, which is why I think the crows are not racist depictions as has been claimed – all are tarred with the same brush, inspected with the same crude magnifying glass. Many fictions are built and thrive on this. There is a difference, however, between a character being a caricature of himself (larger than life, distinctively drawn literally and figuratively) and being a rehash of the ways we’ve seen clowns, country hicks, lions, circus performers and fat cats depicted through the ages. There’s nothing wrong with it ‘morally’ (there’s no malicious intent) but it is a letdown in terms of narrative.
While the story is a bit of a bore (and by no means offering an inspirational moral to take home, as we shall see), the film occasionally gets off the ground in a few magical details, the red ribbon that wards off the evil eye: Dumbo’s bath-time frolics with his mother, a kangaroo cradling its young and creaking like a rocking chair, a clever song that plays on nouns and verbs (“I’ve seen a fireside chat, a baseball bat…”) and a drunken hallucination that includes a hideous monster made up of elephant heads and ends with floating pachyderms softly morphing into clouds in a dawn sky.
This dreamscape, created by a champagne-spiked bath-tub, leaves Dumbo with a hangover and stuck with his only friend Timothy Mouse up a tree. It dawns on the mouse that Dumbo has flown up there. Dumbo doesn’t believe it so Timothy gives him a feather that he says gives him the power to fly. And so he does!
Back at the circus, Dumbo has to perform a terrifying and dangerous act, jumping from a tall burning building. As he jumps, he drops the feather, and the fear and horror in his eyes as he plummets is genuinely disturbing. Depressed by loneliness and sucked of all self-confidence, the shy elephant must finally believe in himself : that he is capable of flying and of doing something extraordinary. Inches from the clowns ready to catch him he swoops up into the rafters of the big top. This an exciting moment of relief and glory.
He sucks up some peanuts and fires them at the elephants who demeaned him. That’ll show them, that’ll shown everybody! But wait. What has it shown them?
The final scene sees Dumbo flying over the train, into the ‘arms’ of his mother, now no longer imprisoned but lounging in her own private carriage. The other elephants look on with joy and awe, accepting him for as shallow a reason as the one for which they ostracised him. ‘We benefit from your freakishness’. This is something of a child’s point of view, a playground mentality. And don’t worry about being bullied, as long as you can fly.
I included Dumbo on a countdown of animated films I did last year on the strength of fusty old extra mature memories. I didn’t have time to revisit it. It turns out that my favourite memory of Dumbo actually comes from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Watching Dumbo again I was disappointed. There are good points: the animation is fine and better for being unspectacular. There are moments of real class and invention.
The best thing about it, though, was discovering afterwards that Dumbo does not utter a word throughout the whole film, not even a sound. I hadn’t even realised. That says something, despite all the cliches, the plasticine vulgarity and the overly silly attitude, for Disney’s abilities. Like Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, this is a great silent performance. Dignity in a world of nonsense.
Stephen Russell-Gebbett has written for Wonders in the Dark since last year. His work can also be found on Checking on My Sausages.
Last week’s entry: The Story of the Fox
Hey Stephen, thanks for the submission! I enjoyed your take on Dumbo and largely agree with both the positives and negatives you lay out here. However, I feel most of the negatives are gathered in the first half and the second half is so strong, from Baby Mine to the pink elephants to the clever crow scene, that I tend to forgive the film’s flaws. And you’re right on about Dumbo’s performance. I’ll probably return tomorrow to say more, but great stuff!
Thanks MovieMan!
Yes, I think the film does get stronger.
Its length, I think, is a problem, as the ‘journey’ to happiness/acceptance is rushed. The outcome is predictable (nothing wrong with that per se) but the one hour running time makes the formula, and the march through the stages of the plot more obvious.
Well, I think the point of DUMBO is missed slightly here in this essay. DUMBO is about many things. Looking at it deeply its a metaphor for prejudice. Simply, its about finding that heros can come from the most unlikely place and that you should never judge a book by its cover. While the animation and the character designs are far simpler in tone and construction, the film does highlight the spectacularly elegant and artistically diverse PINK ELEPHANTS dream sequence which, if you think about it, is directly inspired by the far more formal FANTASIA. DUMBO is a beautifully mounted lark intended to make a viewer smile. I think a lot of people here have forgotten how to do that and just let a film take them away. DUMBO is one of Disney’s unguestionable masterworks from the period when he was banging em outta the park.
I don’t think I missed the point, Dennis.
“Simply, its about finding that heros can come from the most unlikely place and that you should never judge a book by its cover.” I may not come out and say it directly but its implicit in the description of the story.
Parts of the Pink Elephants scene are indeed impressive.
“I think a lot of people here have forgotten how to do that and just let a film take them away.”
I think that’s all I really want from a film. Dumbo just didn’t take me away. Some films do. Perhaps I am more easily distracted by the things I don’t like in a film nowadays. I’m more discriminating but no less open to an enjoyable experience.
Well I would disagree somewhat with the last sentence – while Dumbo has a lot of charm and some undeniably masterful scenes I think it’s a bit thin and slight overall to stand shoulder to shoulder with Bambi, Fantasia, Snow White etc. As you yourself say “a beautifully mounted lark” – but contrast with Bambi the following year (a stone-cold masterpiece of intricate animation), and the contrast becomes clear. Then again, that’s coming from someone who stated yesterday that we shouldn’t privilege epics over sonnets so maybe I’ll have to reconsider my position, haha.
Stephen—
I agree that having Dumbo not speak a word is a masterful stroke, and as you delineate it adds to the artistry in a positive way. Yes, I like the film more than you do and have always found some of its most iconic sequences (like the Pink Elephants on parade) as among Disney’s most irresitible set pieces, and have always applauded the (largely) imaginative use of color and design. The music too, is memorable.
I was thrilled to learn this morning that your singular writing was back on display at Wonders in the Dark.
Now that’s the real ticket!
Thank you Sam. I will always be in the minority regarding the bulk of the films from Disney’s golden era. I try to work out why and then elaborate.
I also count this among my favorite Disney films, but I respect Stephen for being civil and lowering the boom, while still extolling the film’s virtues. Very well-written, too.
Thanks Frank.
Maybe some of the animation experts around here can explain why the look of Dumbo is less intricate and simpler than say Pinocchio or Fantasia? Also the shorter running length makes me think perhaps it was the equivalent of a Disney B film. Either way I personally enjoy it more than Bambi and Snow White.
A Disney B film is a good call which makes it a bit hard to place, because there weren’t really many other films like that at this point, there were shorts vs. features, which were apples vs. oranges. Afterwards Disney seems to have gone back and forth between A and B periods, but for the most part it never really alternated the two approaches film-to-film. (The best comparison I can think of would be Rescuers Down Under squeezed between Little Mermaid & Beauty and the Beast in the ‘renaissance’ period but even that is misleading as the animation in that is actually superb, and technically a step above Little Mermaid in many respects).
As for why the look is intricate and simpler, do you mean you don’t see it or that you do and are wondering why it was? I’d have to relook into the motives (which I think were tied to an impending strike and troubles on Bambi, which was supposed to be the follow-up to Fantasia) but as for the techniques, Dumbo did not use the moving-plane methods used on Bambi whereby we seem to see a background as intricate as the foreground, achieved by creating several levels of cels (sorry if I’m bungling the description, I’m not an animation “expert” but know about this period at the studio) which were slid at different speeds across the screen, creating an illusion of depth. By contrast Dumbo is very flat, cartoony animation. Which in principle I don’t have a problem with – I think early shorts like The Gorilla Mystery are as good as anything Disney did later, on their own terms – but I do sometimes feel the story of Dumbo deserves a little better.
Oh no Joel I do see the difference in animation. It clearly has a flatter look than something like Bambi. And I figured that the technical approach by the animators (cel based etc) was the reason. I just wonder why Disney took such short cuts for Dumbo? Still after the big two, I always harp about when Disney related stuff comes up, it may be my next favorite feature by the company.
The Bambi strike you mention must be the main reason.
Just went to wiki to refresh my memory, and it looks like the strike was more of an after-the-fact thing (though obviously the tensions leading up to it were present throughout production on Dumbo – and the clown song “We’re Gonna Hit the Big Boss For a Raise” must not have been very amusing to Babbit and some of the other animators). But it was originally intended as a short, and expanded as a cost-saving measure after Pinnochio and Fantasia flopped (kind of funny to think on now, but they don’t recoup their costs right away).
Oddly enough, I think Disney himself always considered this his favorite of his movies.
ABSOLUTELY NOT…
Try reading the ART OF WALT DISNEY, which is the definative biography and chronicle of Disney’s work. Disney was heartbroken that FANTASIA didn’t hit when it first premiered. He was tired of the same thing over and over again. After PINOCCHIO and SNOW WHITE he wanted to expand the ideas of fine art in animation and then in film…
FANTASIA was, is and will always be Walt’s favorite. It’s the film he put the most energy and dedication into as it was a completely original concept concocted by him. As for the “flatness” in the animation that you are referring to in DUMBO, the answers are really simple.
1. The film was done as a less elaborate piece because the story demanded a more “cartoony” style. DUMBO was always meant as lighter fare and had to be a garaunteed crowd pleaser after the finacial failure of FANTASIA.
2. The added special effects (i.e. use of things like the multiplane camera) were too expensive at the time and Walt was trying to recoup the financial losses that occured from specially fitting theatres for the sound systems (the very first multi channeled stereo) for FANTASIA (a film that was not a crowd pleaser because they wanted more like PINOCCHIO and SNOW WHITE-Walt was ahead of his time).
3. The animation staff was split into two camps because of the dual productions that were going on at the time. The very best animators (like Ward Kimball and Ollie Johnston) were assigned the “tougher” film, being BAMBI, and the newbies and “lesser” animators were sent to the more traditionally cartoon-like DUMBO.
DUMBO is a great film. It still holds up as one of the classic 5 from the early features.
But, of the 5, it was Walt’s least favorite and is clearly the inferior when compaired to SNOW WHITE, FANTASIA, BAMBI and, particularly, PINOCCHIO (which is regularly cited as the finest of the big 5).
DUMBO was made, primarly, for kids whereas the other four were intended for young and old alike…
I suggest you look up THE ART OF WALT DISNEY. I have read most of the big biographies on Disney and it’s still the definative book on the man and his films… All my answers above are culled from that authorotative reference.
Oh, I didn’t say he considered it his most important or influential feature, or greatest triumph or anything like that. Just that it was his favorite – quite a different matter. Several of his colleagues and friends are on record as saying he had a soft spot for it and considered it his “favorite.” As to what his REAL favorite was, he probably changed his opinion all the time: I’ve heard claims for Dumbo, Fantasia, Bambi, and even Cinderella. At one time or another he may have claimed all of them as a favorite. Regardless, it has been stated publicly that the film was Walt’s favorite (on the DVD extras) so “ABSOLUTELY NOT” seems a tad on the extreme side, haha.
I haven’t read Art of Walt Disney, but there’s a good recent book by Michael Barrier, whose book – while less publicized – seems to have gotten more solid marks for its scholarship and insight than that Gabler book that came out around the same time. Though it’s a bit on the dry side (and its author, visiting his website, seems quite contentious and a bit ill-mannered), it still well-rectifies some of the exaggerated stuff that’s in some of the more lurid bios.
Well, Dumbo may also have been a bit of an exile for some of the more contentious animators, because it looks like Art Babbit worked on this and he was by most accounts one of the best on the lot – but also one of Walt’s biggest opponents in the labor struggles.
After mentioning Barrier above, I was compelled to revisit his great website and found this piece which may be of interest to readers here. It documents in great detail the development and acquisition of the original story:
http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Essays/DumboRollABook/DumboRollABook.html
Stephen,
I’m kind of in the middle maybe on this one. I don’t put it on the pedestal that I have for Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi, but it does have some inspired and memorable moments and still feels like a bona fide classic. Still I just think the source material or genesis of the story is less inspired than some of the other Disneys from this era. Like you mentioned, it came from a comic on a cereal box. What you mentioned:
“The other elephants look on with joy and awe, accepting him for as shallow a reason as the one for which they ostracised him. ‘We benefit from your freakishness’. This is something of a child’s point of view, a playground mentality. And don’t worry about being bullied, as long as you can fly.”
I’m not sure whether this statement is how I view it. I sort of feel like this may be more of a mentality of adults looking back on childhood rather than children as they actually think. I can’t go back there. I’m not a child. But “we benefit from your freakishness” is rather a pessimistic viewpoint that I’m not sure children (I’m talking like ages 4-8) can really process. I don’t know.
The other thing regarding the crows. I think it is possible to view those caricatures and be offended. I admit I do cringe a bit when I see this. Everyone views it differently. You said
“Exaggerations of traits can be stereotyping. It applies to everything in the film, which is why I think the crows are not racist depictions as has been claimed – all are tarred with the same brush, inspected with the same crude magnifying glass.”
I just think taking into account the era we’re talking about (or any era), the portrayal appears rather crude. That’s my opinion. What’s even more interesting, is that Disney apparently is perfectly okay with keeping this film (and those characters) in distribution, while Song of the South will never be released. I’ve never seen it, and I don’t mean to equate anything in either film to a comparison of sorts. I just find it interesting that Disney may have drawn some sort of “line in the sand” and said Dumbo is okay and SOTS is not okay. Just an observation. Maybe plays more into the point you were making.
To me, the crows, while stereotypes, are far more positive, and individualistic, portrayals than we see in most live-action films of the time. Or, for that matter, in some recent Disney movies.
I’ll agree to that although I still find the scenes to be less than desirable from a racial perspective. You’re right, though, perhaps things really haven’t changed much even to the present times.
I just want to say that the Elephants on Parade scene may be the scariest thing I have ever seen in my life. I literally had nightmares for a week about it when I was a kid, something I can’t remember doing with any other film. (I do think it’s kind of amazing now, though.)
Otherwise, I pretty much agree with the review. I’ve always seen it as the weakest film in the Golden Age of Disney.