Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Dumbo

Original 1941 poster for Walt Disney's Dumbo.

Any retrospective project like this one runs the risk of viewing history as a straight line subject to cause-and-effect. First this happened, then this happened and so on and so forth. But history itself is rarely that neat and the nature of animation production emphasizes that fact.

After Snow White, many of Disney’s next films were all in various stages of production at the same time. Movies like Pinocchio and Bambi took years to make. Some of the films Disney was actively developing around this time, including Peter Pan and Alice In Wonderland, wouldn’t come out for another decade or more.

Dumbo was a bit of an exception to the rule. The original story by Helen Aberson-Mayer and Harold Pearl was published in 1939 as a book/toy hybrid called a “Roll-A-Book”. Disney bought the rights almost immediately and story artists Dick Huemer and Joe Grant began developing it into a film in January of 1940. By the time it was ready to go into production, the studio was already losing money on Pinocchio and Fantasia.

Because of those losses, Disney badly needed a hit. If Dumbo was going to be made at all, it would have to be done quickly and economically. The film went into production in late 1940 or early 1941. And even with work interrupted by an animators’ strike in May, the movie was finished and released to theaters in October of 1941. Even by today’s standards, that’s a quick turnaround for an animated feature.

Of course, it helps that Dumbo barely qualifies as a feature. Clocking in at a brisk 64 minutes, it’s easily Disney’s shortest film. At the time, movies of that length weren’t exactly uncommon but they were usually B-pictures or cheapies turned out by such Poverty Row studios as Monogram or Republic. RKO, Disney’s distributor and a studio that knew a thing or two about B-movies, actually asked Walt to add about 10 minutes or so. Either out of artistic integrity or economic necessity, Walt declined.

This was absolutely the right choice. Part of what makes Dumbo so charming is that it doesn’t overstay its welcome. It fits squarely into the misfit underdog story template that resonates with everyone, regardless of age, gender or cultural background. But when we think about Dumbo, we don’t think about the plot. We think about individual moments and sequences. Dumbo isn’t really much more than a short sequence of vignettes. What’s magical about it is that any one of those vignettes would be another movie’s highlight. Dumbo is nothing but highlights.

Dumbo announces it’s different from its predecessors right from the get-go. This isn’t the fairy-tale world of Snow White or the cobblestone European streets of Pinocchio. This is America. Florida, to be exact. And it isn’t once upon a time. It’s 1941. The opening song, “Look Out For Mr. Stork”, makes a pop culture reference to the Dionne Quintuplets, who had fascinated the world since their birth in 1934. The tone, the style, the music, everything suggests that this is going to be a much looser, more casual movie.

But in spite of all that, Dumbo also has a reputation as one of Disney’s most emotional movies. If you watch Dumbo with a group of people and somebody doesn’t cry at least once, watch out because you’re hanging out with some cold-hearted sociopaths. The heart of the film is the relationship between mother and child, encapsulated beautifully in the “Baby Mine” sequence. It’s a testament to both the animators and to the Oscar-nominated song by Frank Churchill and Ned Washington that this sequence lands as powerfully as it does. This is character animation at its finest and the song is simple, lovely and perfect.

The animation has to be perfect in a sequence like this. It’s shouldering the entire storytelling burden. Dumbo has no dialogue throughout the film and Mrs. Jumbo’s only line comes when she christens her son Jumbo Jr. The lack of dialogue is another brilliant choice. It allows every single member of the audience to project their own identity and their own relationship with their mom onto Dumbo and Mrs. Jumbo. When Dumbo is mercilessly teased because of his big ears, we empathize because we’ve all been picked on for one thing or another. When Mrs. Jumbo cradles Dumbo in her trunk, we all know that feeling. Dialogue would only get in the way.

Dumbo has a number of sequences built entirely on the interplay between music and animation. The movie starts with back-to-back songs, the aforementioned stork tune and “Casey Junior”. It’s little wonder that it won the Oscar for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. But apart from “Baby Mine”, the most memorable song and sequence in the film is undoubtedly “Pink Elephants On Parade”.

Over 75 years later, this sequence remains one of the most startling and exciting animated sequences in Disney’s history. Walt’s interest in surrealism and abstract art had already been on display in Fantasia but “Pink Elephants” took it to a new level. The sequence is a hallucinatory masterpiece. A few years later, Walt would strike up a friendship with Salvador Dalí. One imagines the subject of Dumbo must have come up in conversation once or twice.

A surreal image from Pink Elephants On Parade.

Even though so much of Dumbo is unencumbered by dialogue, the characters who do speak manage to leave a big impression. Sterling Holloway makes his Disney debut as Mr. Stork. He, of course, would have a long association with the studio in everything from The Jungle Book to Winnie The Pooh, eventually becoming the first voice actor honored as a Disney Legend.

On the other end of the spectrum, there’s Edward Brophy as Dumbo’s friend and protector, Timothy Q. Mouse. Brophy had a lengthy career as a character actor, usually playing sidekicks and comic relief tough guys. He worked frequently in radio but this was his one and only foray into animation. It’s a standout character that could have been just a Jiminy Cricket knockoff. Brophy’s attitude and delivery gives Timothy a more contemporary edge.

Cliff Edwards, the voice of the actual Jiminy Cricket, also turns up as Dandy Crow (or, as he was originally called…ahem…Jim Crow). All right, let’s talk about the crows. These characters were in the news again recently after Disney+ felt the need to slap a disclaimer on Dumbo and its “outdated cultural depictions”. And sure, they are exaggerated African-American caricatures and their leader is voiced by a white guy (not that anybody would have known that at the time, since none of the voice actors were credited).

But animation, especially this particular cartoony style of animation, is built on caricature. What is the herd of gossiping elephants if not an exaggerated caricature of matronly women? Now, it would be disingenuous to claim that those two things are exactly the same. Jim Crow is too loaded to simply wave it away like that (and, to be fair, they did have the good sense to not actually refer to Edwards’ character as “Jim Crow” in the movie itself). But it would be equally wrong to ascribe any malicious intent to the characters and not acknowledge that this is simply what cartoonists and animators have done since the invention of the form.

Besides, the crows are by far the most fun characters in the movie. You empathize with Dumbo and his mom. You appreciate Timothy’s friendship and positive outlook. But you want to hang out with the crows. They get the catchiest song, the terrific “When I See An Elephant Fly”. And they’re not exactly making fun of Dumbo and Timothy in the same way that the movie’s other characters did. Finding a baby elephant and a mouse passed out in a tree gives them a pretty good reason to be incredulous at first. It doesn’t take long for them to change their tune and help Dumbo and Timothy out by providing the “Magic Feather”. They’re smart, they’re free, they’re funny. The crows are awesome and I find it hard to believe that anyone could be genuinely offended by them.

Dumbo went on to become a huge hit for Disney, almost single-handedly bringing the studio back from the brink of bankruptcy. Appropriately enough, the studio has continued to use it as a cash cow ever since. For years, Disney has floated Dumbo as a sort of test balloon for new technologies and formats. In 1955, Walt allowed it to be shown on television for the first time. At the dawn of the home video era, Disney was reluctant to embrace the VCR. But in 1981, Dumbo and Alice In Wonderland became the first Disney animated classics to be released on VHS and Betamax.

Dumbo VHS Clamshell release from 1981.

Since then, it’s become one of the studio’s most frequently re-released titles on VHS, Laserdisc, DVD and Blu-ray. Disney has worked hard to cultivate a mystique around certain titles, locking them away in the notorious Disney Vault for years at a time. But Dumbo is one of the few that you can grab a copy of pretty much any time you please. You can order it from Amazon right now for about 10 bucks, a bargain compared to most of the other movies we’ve looked at so far.

Perhaps because it’s so ubiquitous or perhaps because it’s so deceptively simple, even devoted Disney fans tend to overlook Dumbo. It’s definitely an unusual film. We all know it as a movie about a flying elephant but the movie ends moments after Dumbo masters the skill. It’s an abrupt but somehow still satisfying conclusion. After being bullied, ridiculed and traumatically separated from his mom, Dumbo’s been through enough. He’s earned his happy ending.

VERDICT: Disney Plus

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Reluctant Dragon

All was not well in the Magic Kingdom in 1941. Just a few years earlier, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs had been a worldwide phenomenon. Its success had enabled Walt Disney to break ground on a new multi-acre studio in Burbank, a big step up from his old Hyperion Avenue studio in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake neighborhood. The Burbank lot officially opened in February of 1940, right around the same time that Disney’s second animated feature, Pinocchio, premiered.

Unfortunately, Pinocchio underperformed at the box office, leading to a million dollar loss for the studio. Its follow-up, Fantasia, premiered in November. By spring of 1941, it was on track to do even worse business than Pinocchio.

As if all that weren’t bad enough, Walt was also facing dissent among his animators who were demanding that the studio be unionized. Disney was having none of that. In a speech to his employees in February of 1941, he essentially dismissed the pro-union faction as a bunch of grumbling whiners. Needless to say, this did not go over well. The next thing Walt knew, he had a full-fledged strike on his hands.

This could not have come at a worse time. The studio was hemorrhaging money and the strike effectively shut down production of Disney’s next planned feature, Dumbo. If the studio was going to survive, Walt needed to get something into theaters. So he made a movie showcasing the biggest asset he had on hand: his shiny new studio in Burbank.

The Reluctant Dragon is, by any definition, a strange film. The movie opens on what is presumably a typical day for noted humorist and occasional actor Robert Benchley (appearing as himself). Mrs. Benchley (played by character actress Nana Bryant, not the actual Mrs. Benchley) reads aloud from Kenneth Grahame’s children’s book The Reluctant Dragon, while Robert lounges in the pool shooting darts at duck decoys. Mrs. Benchley is convinced that the story would make a great Walt Disney film. So she hectors her husband into dropping by the lot unannounced to somehow sell Walt the movie rights to this book (that, again, he did not write and presumably does not have any controlling interest in).

Once there, Robert is assigned a security guard escort named Humphrey (Buddy Pepper), an annoying little Poindexter who rattles off facts and data about the lot straight from the Disney Investors’ Prospectus. Robert understandably wants to shake Humphrey and, somewhat less understandably, avoid meeting Walt (perhaps to avoid being sued by the Kenneth Grahame estate), so he ducks into various rooms at random and ends up getting a lesson (more or less) in how cartoons get made.

As a documentary, The Reluctant Dragon is of dubious value. If you knew absolutely nothing about animation going into it, you would perhaps know slightly more than nothing coming out. Most of the Disney “employees” we meet are actors, including Alan Ladd as a story man who pitches Baby Weems to Benchley, Frank Faylen (who you’ll no doubt recognize as Ernie from It’s A Wonderful Life) as an orchestra leader, and Frances Gifford as Doris. We first meet Doris providing vocal effects for Casey Junior (soon to appear in Dumbo) and she ends up acting as a more attractive tour guide for Benchley but it’s never all that clear what her actual job is supposed to be.

Now as a Disney fan, some of these sequences are a lot of fun. We get to meet Clarence Nash and Florence Gill, the voices of Donald Duck and Clara Cluck. We get to see foley effects made, including the cool sonovox used by Doris. We get to see the massive multi-plane camera, the maquette department and a gorgeous Technicolor tour of the ink-and-paint department. And with the benefit of hindsight, we realize that 1941 audiences were treated to quite the preview of coming attractions. There are glimpses of Dumbo, Bambi and, if you’re really paying attention in the maquette department, models from such future films as Peter Pan and Lady And The Tramp.

But for anyone expecting a worthy successor to Disney’s first three films, this hodgepodge of animated scraps and live-action tour certainly wasn’t it. In 1941, the name Walt Disney was even more synonymous with animation than it is today and there is precious little animation to be found, including a few seconds of Donald Duck here and a few seconds of Bambi there. All told, there are four major animated sequences. The first is the black-and-white glimpse of Casey Junior, which is intercut with live-action looks at the sound effects team in action. The rest come one after the other at the tail end of the film and one of those isn’t even fully animated.

That would be the aforementioned Baby Weems sequence, told in the form of a stylized animatic. Even if this had been fleshed out, it isn’t much of a cartoon. It’s about a genius baby who becomes a worldwide sensation, gets sick, then reverts to being a normal baby after he recovers. As a means to recycle some rejected storyboards, it’s certainly cost-effective but that’s about the best you can say about it.

The next sequence, Goofy starring in How To Ride A Horse, is one of the film’s highlights. This was actually the first of Goofy’s long-running How-To shorts that would find our intrepid hero mastering everything from skiing (“pronounced shee-ing”) to hooking up a home theatre. These were some of the funniest cartoons Disney ever produced and the formula is established from the get-go here. And for Disney aficionados, it’s nice to see the animators in this sequence portrayed by actual animators Ward Kimball, Fred Moore and Norm Ferguson.

Finally, Benchley arrives at the Disney screening room where he comes face-to-face with Walt himself and watches his latest cartoon: The Reluctant Dragon. (I guess the fact that Walt has already made the movie Benchley wanted to sell him is meant to be a punchline of sorts but I couldn’t tell you what the joke’s supposed to be.) This is a pleasant little two-reeler about a boy who befriends a gentle, poetry-loving dragon. When the eccentric knight Sir Giles rides into town, the boy tries to arrange a battle between the two, only to discover that Sir Giles is a bit of a poet himself. So a mock battle is arranged, Sir Giles emerges triumphant and the dragon’s fearsome reputation is rehabilitated.

Kenneth Grahame’s original story works on a number of different levels but Disney seems content with just a surface reading. It’s silly, breezy fun but nothing more. Disney had proven himself capable of much more than this and not just in his features. He’d made Silly Symphonies and other short films with more ambition than is on display here. This feels exactly like the placeholder it was.

The Reluctant Dragon was hardly a blockbuster but it accomplished what it was designed to do: it turned a modest profit. Walt Disney did eventually (and begrudgingly) sign a union contract, ending the strike and getting the studio back to work. But the strike came at a heavy cost. Many of Disney’s best animators left the studio, some temporarily, others forever. Some went to MGM, others went to Warner Bros. A handful, including David Hilberman, Stephen Bosustow and John Hubley, struck out on their own, forming United Productions of America (UPA), a studio that would have a profound effect on animation in the 1940s and 50s.

This was also an important film in the burgeoning cult of personality that was beginning to surround Disney and persists to this day. Seriously, who else besides Walt Disney would even consider releasing a movie like this? The “peek-behind-the-curtain” premise is really just an excuse to show off the new Burbank digs. That’s a premise Walt would return to in the 1950s with the opening of Disneyland, both the theme park and the TV show of the same name.

More importantly, The Reluctant Dragon and its all-access tour of the Burbank studio sows the seeds that will eventually blossom into Disneyland’s moniker, “The Happiest Place on Earth”. Life on the Disney lot looks like a dream job. It’s unstructured, free-wheeling, and open to all. You don’t even need an appointment to get a meeting with Walt himself. Everyone who works on the lot is happy, smiling, and eager to stop whatever they’re doing and show off their work. It’s a magical place full of music and laughter where no one would ever even consider grabbing a picket sign and going on strike.

Of course, real life is a lot messier than a Disney movie, which is exactly why Walt went to such pains to ensure that his movies had as little to do with real life as possible. The Reluctant Dragon couldn’t make all of Disney’s problems go away. His real employees were still on strike and his studio still badly needed money. But it could hide them for a little while and make the rest of the world believe that Disney’s land was the happiest studio on Earth.

VERDICT: A split decision. For hardcore Disney buffs, it’s a Disney Plus. For the more casual fan, it’s a Disney Minus.