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.
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