Film #112 - Dumbo (1941)
If Snow White is the film that made Disney studios, Dumbo is the one that saved them. You see, after the success of Snow White, Walt Disney set his sights a bit higher than just making entertainment. He made Fantasia. It was an enormously expensive undertaking that proved financially disastrous. Now, Disney could probably have absorbed these losses (after all, they were still making very successful shorts) were it not for the fact that the film he had released earlier in 1940, Pinocchio, had also been a box office disappointment. So, with markets being lost to World War II and production resources limited by the drain that the upcoming Bambi was putting on the studio, Walt needed a hit, he needed it fast and he needed it to be cheap.
Dumbo was just the ticket. Based on a children’s book that was only eight pages long, it provided Disney and his artists with a simple skeleton on which they could build a feature film quickly and economically. And build quickly they did. The book was published in 1939, Disney bought the rights in 1940 and the film hit theaters in October of 1941, the fastest journey to the screen of any Disney feature.
They also simplified the art style, utilizing a look that mimicked the style of the book, but also lacked the attention to detail of the previous productions, and therefore the costs involved. And perhaps the biggest cost and time saver of them all was the film’s running time: 64 minutes. It is the shortest of all Disney movies and wouldn’t even qualify as an “animated feature” today.
But it still packs a punch. The scenes of Dumbo and his mother being mistreated by the other elements have as much emotional impact as anything in any other Disney film and, frankly, those nasty clowns still get to me to this day. (For a long time I didn’t know why I disliked clowns so much, but I eventually realized it had to go back to Dumbo. They’re mean.)
The break from Disney’s standard art style allowed the artists on Dumbo to go off in new directions that really help the film stand out. The most famous is the “pink elephants” sequence, but there are also some really great original visuals in the performance scenes (like the clown/fire stuff) and the more simplified approach to animating the animals allows them to be highly charicatured and therefore more distinctive than other Disney animals.
Dumbo is certainly not one of my favorite Disney animated features. It’s too short and I am not fond of films that heap abuse on their central characters just to redeem them later. But I can’t deny the impact of the film both historically and for audiences. It definitely connects and gets the job done despite its lower tech production. And its a testament to the fact that in its heyday Disney could create excellent material, even when working on the cheap.