Saludos Amigos (1943) & The Three Caballeros (1945)

 Firstly, to those reading on release I must apologise for the delayed release of this post, it is partially due to covering two films, and partially as I’ve done some reading on these films as I hope will be apparent.

In 1940 Nelson Rockefeller, grandson to the famous John D. Rockefeller and future Vice President of the United States, was appointed as the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) by FDR to rebuff the Nazi influence in Latin America (Adams 2007). Beyond the political ties, the influence of the Nazis was obvious in the banning of 1939s Confessions of a Nazi Spy and Chaplin’s famous 1940 The Great Dictator, both blatantly anti-Nazi films, by a large portion of Latin America. The Rockefeller and the CIAA were reorganising FDR’s Good Neighbour Policy to attempt to combat this influence, and to attempt to bind the hemisphere together in opposition to Axis powers that had recently begun the war in Europe. By the late 30s Hollywood were also looking to Latin America to assist the Good Neighbour Policy (Berndt Morris & Morris 2011) as well as to possibly supplement the lost income from all the theatres in Europe that were closed to them by then (Adams 2007).

In 1941 Rockefeller’s CIAA fully funded sending a team of Disney animators, musicians, cinematographers, technicians, etc. on a two month tour of Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, and Peru (Adams 2007). Their mandate was to create something that would read to Latin American audiences as “authentic” (Berndt Morris & Morris 2011) and, however mixed their success, Saludos Amigos succeeds by giving “pride of place to the creative process of the Disney team: how they experience Latin America and transform their experiences into image, movement, and sound” (Hess 2017, p 111). As I will explore later, I feel that the abandonment of this format lets down the sequel The Three Caballeros.

Both of these films are essentially a collection of shorts; however Saludos Amigos is much more clearly structured into independent sections, as different characters show up and more clearly in different countries. The whole thing is narrated as a kind of travelogue by Fred Shields.

The film begins with the main theme for the movie, sung by a male choir that, as pointed out by Hess (2017, p 113), are either “nonnative speakers of English, or they are trying to sound as if they were”, immediately establishing the tone of international community that the film itself is attempting to foster. We are shown live action footage of the Disney team boarding a plane, and taking off, before quite smoothly transitioning to an animated map where the plane flight south is depicted. The plane flies through Rio de Janeiro (notably the country is spelled ‘Brasil’), Buenos Aires, and then inland over the Argentine pampas before the plane splits into two and we initially follow the one heading to Lake Titicaca in Peru. This whole sequence is brilliantly conceived as the map has numerous perspectives of major landmarks that the planes fly past slowly enough for the viewer to absorb.

The first travel section is in Lake Titicaca, Peru, and we are shown the plane landing in live action as well as people navigating the lake, and general village life around. A man is shown playing a flute, which then transitions to “a celebrated North American tourist” Donald Duck looking out over the lake, and experiencing altitude sickness. Donald tries piloting the balsa reed boats and demonstrates that they might be sturdy, but they aren’t impervious to Donald the Duck. He then wanders around town and meets a local child who controls llama’s with a flute. Donald gives that a go and annoys the llama by playing a jazzy tune. The llama and the duck then go up the side of a cliff and have shenanigans over the town on a suspension bridge.

Next we fly over the Andes to Chile where Shields informs us they weren’t allowed to film. We are shown footage of the artists beginning work in the plane, and several gorgeous paintings or drawings (I’m not clear what all of them are) of scenes they saw while crossing the Andes. Shields then tells us they were inspired by tales of the first mail planes to cross the Andes and we are shown early sketches of Pedro the baby mail plane, before transitioning into the short itself. Pedro is from an air-field near Santiago, and we are shown glimpses of his life, including studying “reading, sky-writing, and arithmetic”. One day his parents are too sick to make the flight across the Andes so he must do it the first time. His flight from Santiago to Mendoza is relatively uneventful, except for passing slightly closer to the dangerous mountain Aconcagua with it’s unpredictable weather patterns (helpfully given a truly ominous scowling face so we really know it’s bad news). Pedro picks up the mail bag and is having fun chasing a condor (or vulture?) and doing some fancy tricky flying before coming face to face with Aconcagua by mistake. He attempts to get out of there but a storm sucks him in. He attempts many ways out of the storm and almost loses the mail, but is eventually able to make it above the storm, but runs out of fuel just as he rises above the storm clouds. We cut back to the airfield where his parents have just given up when he manages to slide in seemingly out of nowhere. They open the bag and find a single postcard which reads in Spanish “”Having a wonderful time, wish you were here” and is addressed to Jorge Délano Coke of Topaze, a Chilean magazine, who hosted Disney and his team in Santiago” (Hess 2017, p 123).

A beautiful animated map shot takes us back across the Andes to Buenos Aires and we are shown a number of gorgeous live action shots of the city before we see Argentine artist Florencio Molina Campos showing Disney his art depicting life on the pampas, and particularly of the gauchos. The Disney crew are treated to a rodeo and asada (Argentine barbecue) as there is traditional dancing on the stage. The fade to animation shows a US cowboy in Texas before we recognise Goofy on a horse. He is magically transported to the pampas and given gaucho clothes to experience what life is like for the Latin American version of the cowboy. He demonstrates number of the skills of the gaucho, but always getting it slightly wrong (for example when singing at night we hear a beautiful rendition of Yo soy la blanca paloma (Mess 2017) before it’s revealed through a skip that he’s actually lipsyncing to a phonograph). Importantly (and this will be returned to later) the butt of all the jokes is always Goofy in this sketch.

Finally we return to the most elaborate map animation yet with Rio de Janeiro and live action footage shows the natural beauty as well as street cafes and wonderful street mosaics, which are then shown in their paintings and drawings. We are also shown footage of a parrot watching them work and then a Brazilian woman demonstrating the basic samba step. We are then treated to a rendition of Aquarela do Brasil (Watercolour of Brazil) by Brazilian songwriter Ary Barroso and performed, in Portuguese, by Aloysio Oliveira. True to the name a gorgeous sequence is animated almost akin to a speedpaint of a brush bringing a watercolour rainforest landscape to life. A splash of blue paint becomes a waterfall that rushes to fill a riverbed that is drawn around it as the landscape is revealed by its twists and turns. A series of things are drawn, then changes into other things, for example a bunch of bananas has a splash of black added then becomes a flock of yellow-beaked toucans. A bee flies up to a flower then is swallowed by the pitcher plant, which then becomes Donald Duck who burps the bee back up again. He watches as José Carioca, a new Disney character based on the green Brazilian parrot, is drawn in front of him. Carioca takes Donald into Rio and shows him around before taking him to try Cachaça. Donald breathes out fire to light the Parrot’s cigar before being hit by the booze and starting hiccuping a beat. He’s told that’s samba before the brush reappears and dips into the cachaça bottle then paints a number of instruments to play samba music. We’re then shown Donald dancing silhouette behind a window as the camera pulls back to a wide shot showing a gorgeous painting of the whole of Rio, the camera continues to pull back to show us the painting on a board.

Saludos Amigos is, at heart, a propaganda film. And I think it succeeds at being exactly as authentic as it paradoxically needed to be to be both good and achieve the effect it needed to. It shows a real love (albeit a prosperous tourist’s love - we’ll get to it momentarily) of Latin America and takes pains to show the domestic US audience the urban western-ness of the southern continent - something that came as somewhat of a shock to said audiences at the time (Adams 2007). Both Aquarela do Brasil and Tico-Tico no Fubá (a choro song that plays when Donald asked Carioca what samba is) are still extremely popular and successful to this day both in Brazil and abroad (Berndt Morris & Morris 2011). The film was not only successful in the USA, where it received seemingly self-congratulatory praise, but it also “impressed Latin Americans … playing to great acclaim in major cities in Argentina and Chile” (Hess 2017). I think that a large part of how this film works so well is that it feels authentically like a reaction to being immersed in a culture for a short time. The artists being shown on the planes and in situ working on their sketches and drawing the things that take their fancy sets up wonderfully for the shorts that follow. By including the viewer for a small part of the creative process, the shorts do not read as the definitive declaration of the culture, but as an outsider’s interpretation of the things that they saw. This brings a level of authenticity which previous Good Neighbour Policy films had struggled with (Berndt Morris & Morris 2011). As well as this there is an obvious care paid to the music throughout the film. As Berndt Morris & Morris (2011) as well as Hess (2017) both argue that despite falling short in some areas, the music for this film largely succeeds at tying local Latin American sounds into a more typical US soundscape, and I would say that this is done with great success.

Now the astute reader will remember that this post is titled as being for BOTH Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros and may be extremely worried around the 1700 word point that we aren’t even halfway through this post. Not to fear. I did not enjoy The Three Caballeros and don’t intend to cover it in the level of detail I have for the first film.

The Three Caballeros is another anthology of shorts with a focus on Latin America (in this case largely Mexico), this time with the framing device of Donald Duck opening presents and them containing film reels, picture books, and somehow even friends from Latin America.

The first story is about a penguin who doesn’t like the cold so travels north on an ice boat to find a tropical beach. The predictable happens when the sun is found but he finds a tropical island anyway

Next is the story of a gaucho child named Gauchito who goes hunting for condors one day but finds a winged donkey instead. He uses it to win a horse race but is discovered at the last second before claiming the prize money and escapes to the sky, never to be seen again

Then José Carioca pops out of a present and we are transported into a pop-up book version of Baía (wikipedia tells me it should be spelled Bahia, but the film uses a different spelling and I’ll stick with the film on this) where live action people are dancing and singing in what appears to be an animated city. Donald hits on a woman and eventually gets a kiss on the forehead (obstructed from the camera view for obvious practical reasons) before leaving.

Then a new character emerges, a Mexican Rooster named Panchito. He takes them through a magic book to live action shots of Mexico with the Disney characters animated on top of them. Donald Duck becomes more lecherous towards women, then they arrive at a beach and the “scantily clad” women flee him with no men in sight. Then he seemingly goes on an acid trip where a woman sings to him from the stars, then flowers, and I fully lost the plot at this point. A cactus turns into a woman who dances aggressively at Donald while cacti hit him from time to time, then turns back into a cactus, a voice whispers “pretty girls” repeatedly while flowers filled with live action women’s faces appear around donald. It feels like what I imagine an acid trip would feel like, and not in a pleasant way.

Mercifully the film ends eventually, and I am left trying to find a way to summarise why I disliked it so much without spending forever inflicting it upon everyone who reads this. To begin with, the authenticity that was so important to Saludos Amigos succeeding is completely absent. Without the acknowledgement of the artists’ hands, and the 4th wall destroying act of showing us their creative process, there is a much higher level of discomfort that I had with the US company telling me about Latin America. Donald Duck’s lechery was not that prominent in the previous film, but here he calls so many women “toots” so many times that I was wondering if the image of a US tourist chasing women who clearly don’t want anything to do with him was as damaging in Mexico then, as it would be today. The creative animated sequences are well done, and the acid trip sequence would be impressive, but it is so unmoored from what has happened before, and the live action elements so jarring and/or uncanny, that I simply lost the thread. Where Saludos Amigos was able to walk a razor's edge, and be a piece of propaganda that was nonetheless an interesting tribute to the countries it was trying to woo, The Three Caballeros read to me as not only thoughtless, but likely counter-productive even as propaganda. I am grateful to move on from this film, but worried that the remaining four package films from the 40s will take more after Caballeros than Saludos Amigos, but join me in the next week or two (finding one of  these may be a problem) to discover if my fears are founded as we continue through the package films.

REFERENCES

(yes, that’s right, the blog post has citations and a reference list)

Adams, Dale. 2007. “Saludos Amigos: Hollywood and FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 24 (3): 289–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/10509200500486395.

Berndt Morris, Elizabeth, and Charles Morris. 2011. “Walt Disney and Diplomacy: The Musical Impact of Aquarela Do Brasil.” In Latin American Music Center’s Fiftieth-Anniversary Conference Titled “Cultural Counterpoints: Examining the Musical Interactions between the U.S. And Latin America.” Latin American Music Center. https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/15542.

Hess, Carol A. 2017. “Walt Disney’s Saludos Amigos: Hollywood and the Propaganda of Authenticity.” In The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles, edited by Josh Kun, 105–23. Oakland, California: University of California Press.

Bambi (1942)

 The last of the first run of traditional Disney Animated movies, Bambi is maybe the one I came into with the fewest preconceptions, and also the one I think I left liking the most. This is partially because Bambi doesn’t feature a lot of cultural elements that have aged poorly, and also because the lack of dialogue that hurt Dumbo is effectively used in this entry. 

The story of Bambi is a fairly typical coming of age narrative, so I will try to move swiftly through it to the meat. Bambi is a truly adorable fawn born the “prince of the forest”. He spends his earliest life with his mother then making friends with other woodland critters such as the rabbit Thumper and a skunk Bambi names Flowers. They explore the woods together and teach each other, but primarily Bambi, the ways of things. Then Bambi is taught the dangers of the open meadow by his mother and meets a fellow fawn, Faline. During his first winter Bambi and his mother venture to the meadow to find food when humans are heard and they flee together. A shot is heard but Bambi makes it home safely, not realising that his mother has died. He searches for her for a time before his father, named Great Prince by the subtitles, finds him and takes him away. Springtime brings with it a seemingly matured Bambi who is reintroduced to all his childhood friends now they are all adults. They are told about love, swear off it, then all immediately fall for the first animal of their species they see who is the opposite sex. Bambi fights a fairly brutal match against another stag over an adult Faline and is victorious. They have a romantic evening and “spend the night together” before Bambi is roused by something and ventures to the edge of the forest where he finds his father. Humans have come back to the forest and creatures flee from them, but many are shot. Faline awakes and is surprised by Bambi’s absence so flees alone, Bambi returns to fetch her to safety but misses her. They find each other but have to fight off a pack of hunting dogs, after he is victorious over the dogs by catching them in a landslide Bambi leaps across a canyon gap but is shot in midair. The hunter’s recklessly abandoned camp causes a forest fire and Bambi is only able to flee it thanks to the Great Prince finding him and managing to rouse him enough to flee. The animals, including Faline, of the forest all shelter on an island in the middle of a river. The film ends with all of our secondary youthful characters having had children, before we find Faline has birthed twins, the camera pans up to see the Great Prince, and the fully grown Bambi beside him, watching over the young family. The Great Prince turns and walks away whilst Bambi stays.

The wonderful animation and generally stunning visuals of Bambi do a lot of the heavy lifting on the storytelling that is being done. Where I felt that Dumbo lost a lot of clarity by having its protagonist stay silent the whole film, and have another character motor mouth for both of them, Bambi is not silent, just quiet. This allows him to still provide insight into his feelings that we can’t see, but the absence of a Timothy analogue is what helps the most here. Scenes are able to just breathe without a character needing to talk over them, and because of this the visuals are able to bring out the emotions and themes of this film. The joy in the early Summer/Winter sections are beautifully captured, with the adorable baby animals (seriously my notes contain the words “x is too cute, I’ll die” too often) frolicing around the forest in Summer, then skating across ice and playing in the snow. When Bambi’s mother is showing him the meadow she walks out first to try to confirm it’s safe, and the background is largely a gradient of smokey greys that perfectly capture the tension, as well as foreshadow what she is afraid of. Every time the hunters are at work the smokey grey backgrounds return, and finally the foreshadowing is completed when the smoke becomes literal as the forest burns because of the hunter’s lack of care. The shots of the Great Prince on the hill, then the final shot where he is joined by a matching Bambi also communicate effectively the sense of pride and remote care. The fight scene between the bucks is often drawn in a more rough and unfinished style with a much reduced colour palette which extremely effectively enhances the brutality of the violence as they strive to be the one to court Faline. Lastly for this section, as Bambi hunts for his mother that the audience knows is dead, the framing is almost dutch angles, with us seeing Bambi in extremely severe angles obscured by trees and distance. Overall the animation is just clearer in what it is trying to do, and better at achieving the goal.

The themes of Bambi are maybe where the film falters a little, as they are a little muddled in some ways, but even this flaw depends on which theme you think is primary. At the time, and even today, it seems that people are quick to point out that Bambi isn’t anti-hunting. This argument, to me, seems fairly ridiculous. The film makes humanity such an oppressively destructive force despite never being seen on screen. The grief of the infant fawn is over his mother being killed by hunters. The panic and fear of the small meadow birds is about being shot by hunters. The pack of dogs that nearly kill both Faline and Bambi are trained and set loose by hunters. The forest fire is started from the hunters’ camp. The beautiful forest backgrounds fade whenever there is even a threat from them. I think that any argument that this film is not anti-hunting is searching for evidence where very little exists. Truly the only weakness of this theme is that while the emotional grief and fear is felt, the film is oddly bloodless. While this works in the fight over Faline, the stylisation makes the scene feel brutal without needing obvious wounds, when Bambi is literally buried beneath a pack of dogs or is ostensibly shot the lack of any wound or blood can make the challenge feel less real. It especially muddles the moment where Bambi is shot, a scene that should be completely filled with tension, because the audience needs to assume that the deer was hit. There is no obvious impact and Bambi simply cannot stand. Lowering the visual brutality of the hunters to less than what is given to another member of Bambi’s species doesn’t equate to being not anti-hunting, but it does weaken the overall impact of some of the otherwise strongest scenes in the film. If one assumes that the anti-hunting theme is primary then the themes are a little weak. I believe that the primary theme is actually the circle of life. Bambi begins and ends with a

 “prince of the forest” having an heir born and being cooed over by the forest creatures. It shows the coming of age of one and the cycles of violence and life that occupies creatures' lives. Within this the violence of humanity is still an unwelcome and disruptive force that is applied from the outside, but the weakness of parts of the secondary theme make more sense from within this overall message.

Finally I just want to mention a few things that I noticed but didn’t fit well into my analysis so far. First the transition songs were quite good, and the first non-diegetic (or at least not sung by a character) songs in this run that I didn’t mind, although the transition from Bambi mourning his mother to a very upbeat song about Spring was a little too jarring. I was reminded of how (many years later) Frozen was able to better handle the transition from the bleak despair of the end of Do You Wanna Build A Snowman to the Coronation Day and The First Time in Forever atmosphere by including a piece of transition music that’s only a minute long. Although this isn’t perfect in Frozen (in my opinion that transition needed another 30-60 seconds) the emotional whiplash in Bambi was significantly worse and I couldn’t leave it unmentioned. The voice acting for the child animals was surprisingly solid, but I was extremely happy when Thumper transitioned to his adult voice. The child did a good job being annoying, but that’s not always great as a viewer.

Bambi was a film I had not seen much as a child, and did not have fond memories of. I remembered it being a little boring and not having much beyond a famous death. I was extremely pleasantly surprised to discover what I think is the most successfully deep of Disney’s first five theatrical releases. The characters and themes remain relevant today, and this film feels like it wants me to remember it as more than entertainment the most, other than Fantasia. I enjoyed it thoroughly and am glad that I have revisited it as an adult.

Now for a scheduling note, the next six films are all outside the traditional idea of a “Disney Animated Feature” as they are all compilations of shorter stories, some with mixed in live action footage. All this to say I may cover more than one at a time to try to get through these a little more swiftly and get back to the traditional Disney fare. Next week will be the first of the package films, Saludos Amigos (and maybe its sequel The Three Caballeros if I can fit it in).

Dumbo (October 1941)

   

 Dumbo is perhaps the first film I was truly not looking forward to revisiting. We will come to one of the big reasons why later, but I remembered seeing it a few times in my childhood and being bored and quite disliking it. This watch hasn’t brought me all the way around to liking it, but I certainly didn’t hate it the way I had expected to.

The film begins with a disembodied man giving some ominous rhymes over a very cool looking snowstorm. Then a wing of storks flying over an extremely stylised map of the US, state names and everything included, and dropping their bundles off as if they’re bombs. Lots of cute baby animals are dropped in front of their parents, and an elephant looks expectantly then sadly at the bundles that are all missing her. An unspecified amount of time passes and the circus packs up all the animals into their uniquely horrific carriages on a train, then moves on. A stork dressed as a postman hurries after it to deliver to the elephant, who we learn is named Mrs Jumbo, her baby. He sings happy birthday to the new Jumbo Jr then is nabbed by a post-hook outside the train. Inside, Mrs Jumbo and the other elephants are cooing over Jumbo Jr before his giant ears are revealed and the other elephants all reject him, renaming him Dumbo. Mrs Jumbo continues to cradle him. At the next stop the circus is set up and all the animals help the roustabouts, before the public is let in to see Dumbo and a bunch of kids mock him so much that Mrs Jumbo steps in and causes a scene, she is then locked in an isolated cage and labelled mad. The other elephants blame Dumbo for making them look bad, and are scared by a little mouse named Timothy who goes and convinces Dumbo to be his friend by saying they’ll go rescue his mum. He gets distracted by hearing the Ringmaster talk about an idea for a “pyramid of pachyderms” that doesn’t have the climax figured out. Timothy pretends to be the Ringmaster's subconscious and gives him the idea of Dumbo vaulting to the top waving a flag. After another ambiguous amount of time they’re seemingly doing the trick for the first time live but Dumbo trips over his ears bringing down the pyramid of elephants and seemingly the whole tent as well. The elephants gripe about him and declare him “not an elephant” because of the incident and he is sent to the clowns. The clowns then do an act that climaxes with Dumbo falling out of a burning building through a fake trampoline into a cream pie. They celebrate the act and accidentally drop a bottle of champagne into his water bucket. Dumbo finally goes to his mother with Timothy and is cradled in her trunk during the song Baby Mine. Then Dumbo and Timothy get high on the water from the bucket and they seemingly share the same acid trip, this being the famous Pink Elephant sequence. They wake up in a tree and talk to the Crows who do their famous song, then give Dumbo the “magic” feather to teach him to fly. Dumbo then returns to the circus and jumps out of the building that has been made even higher but instead of falling (seemingly to his death) he loses his grip on the feather but flies anyway learning that the power was within him all along. Dumbo is given a private carriage on the train for himself and his mother as a montage shows all the success he brings to the circus and the mouse that is his manager (incidentally the only reason we know Timothy’s name is because of the shot of his signature, it’s not mentioned at all in the dialogue). 

Laid out in this play-by-play it may seem like a lot to fit into only 64 minutes of runtime, but unfortunately I found that each individual scene dragged a little bit longer than I felt like it should, leading to the film feeling quite slowly paced despite the amount it fits in. Strangely it also feels like it rushes through the emotional arcs of the characters quite a bit. We only get a short scene with both Dumbo and Mrs Jumbo before they’re ripped apart, then only a short scene before we go into circus shenanigans, then Dumbo learns to fly and we cut to the climax of a new clown act where Dumbo learns to fly without the feather. There’s often an emotionality that is implied, but not given room to breath. Is Dumbo confident about flying before he’s taken to the top of the tower and suddenly is unsure? Does he feel adrift and alone without his mother and Timothy fills that void? Does he know what he’s supposed to be doing and is just unhappy about them in the circus scenes, or is he being told what to do for the first time? There is a lot implied quickly, that I feel would be better served if we could have time to see it. The Baby Mine scene is a fantastic example of this being done well. We see how comforted Mrs. Jumbo makes Dumbo and we see the love and companionship all the other animals are able to share with their offspring, that Dumbo and Mrs Jumbo are largely denied. If the film took more moments like this the emotional beats of the story would land better.

The theme of this film is clearly about not judging people for things, and is reinforced by the idea that qualities that make someone exceptional might also make them different from normal. As far as it goes this is a fairly non-controversial theme and is even relatively well done in the main plot, but I was not able to look past the second of four films made by Disney that shows the lower (read working) classes as vile and cruel. In Pinocchio it was done by having the “working class” vices picked out as the ones that are punished. Here it is seen in the ways that the participants and audience of the circus mistreat Dumbo and the other animals. This underlying mistrust of the common man is not antithetical to the themes of acceptance and it certainly was not obvious when I was a child, but it does cut against the message of the film a small amount. The reason I am not willing to go further than mild discomfort is that there are no obviously aristocratic or upper class characters or proxies in this film that are more generous to Dumbo. In fact the main characters who do show compassion to Dumbo are also coded to be minorities themselves. Timothy the mouse has a “New Yawk” accent, and there have been volumes written about the racial coding of the crows. I will not be going into the ramifications or history of the racial coding in this film as it is far outside my own knowledge and from what I can see there is disagreement from the African American community as to how negative this is. What I will say is that the crows are the only creatures in this movie, other than Mrs Jumbo, that see Dumbo outside of what they can gain from him, and this fact makes the origins in Minstralism more complicated. Are they coded black to show solidarity between abused peoples, or are they shown doing a performance of blackness commonly done to mock black people by their oppressors. I’m not going any further than to point out this debate as I do not have the tools or expertise to weigh in with any kind of confidence or authority.

Similar to Snow White, the tone of Dumbo is so radically different scene to scene that it again feels like a number of interconnected shorts. I think some of the pacing issue that I described above makes sense when viewing the film through this lens. If each individual beat is being thought of semi-independently then the little bit of extra time needed to fill the gaps could be easily forgotten. I think the interstitial material is what is most missing in this. There is very little transition between scenes, to the point of it being rather jarring sometimes, in a way that Snow White didn’t have to struggle with as much. Each scene is relatively entertaining on its own, despite the slow pace I mentioned earlier, it’s only when they’re strung together without enough between the skits that the pace starts to feel so slow and disjointed. While in Snow White I felt the skeleton of connected shorts largely helped the film, here it feels like the lack of connective tissue hurts it. I hope moving forward that Disney begins to see these characters as having more traditional arcs and also fixes some of the pacing issues when there are such obvious starts and ends of ideas.

Overall Dumbo was better than I remembered, but still quite rough. Somehow a 64 minute film felt rushed and paced too slowly at the same time. Many of the best character moments are left offscreen or not shown, and the climactic moments suffer because this lack of emotional build up means that the payoff moments aren’t as strong. While there are still moving moments, and also sections of impressive animation, the artistry didn’t come together here in my opinion. Fantasia suffered from showing me the absolute best stuff at the beginning and raising my expectations too high, whereas this suffers from just never having anything that matches that quality to begin with. This is probably the first film in this project that I left overall not liking.

Next week we go to the infamous Bambi, before we jump off into the tumultuous run of films for the rest of the 40s.