![]() ![]() Jumbo’s bundle of joy is finally delivered by a late Mr. Yet Dumbo is also the feature in which Uncle Walt plucks the heartstrings most shamelessly, and the cruelty and pathos of the film extends for far too long, with too little catharsis at the end.Īfter all the other animal mothers already have their babies, lonely, homely Mrs. Here, for a few minutes, Dumbo rises to brilliance.ĭumbo’s fans celebrate its emotional power as the secret of its success, and it’s true that Dumbo has an emotional directness surpassing even Pinocchio and Bambi - a feat even more remarkable in light of Dumbo’s wordlessness. (After Dumbo, many of them retired.)ĭumbo’s inebriation also unleashes the animators’s strengths as the film breaks into the astounding, surreal animation of “Pink Elephants” number. Where the other early Disney features were the work of a new generation of animators who would later be known as Disney’s Nine Old Men, Dumbo was a last hurrah for the old guard, animators whose pioneering work on Disney’s Silly Symphonies had helped to develop animation as an art form, and who paved the way for the feature animation period, but didn’t really belong to that period. There’s nothing wrong with the animation in Dumbo it’s proficient and at times it’s quite lovely, but it’s not distinguished by the superior artistry of its peers. Jumbo and the other elephants with the anatomical realism of Bambi, his mother and the other deer. Compare the cartoony elephant anatomy of Dumbo, Mrs. ![]() Dumbo really was originally developed as a short film, but was promoted to a feature after the triumph of Snow White was followed by the financial disappointments of Fantasia and Pinocchio.ĭumbo was deliberately made on the cheap, without the lavish background work or lush animation styles of its peers. That’s how Dumbo has always struck me - and it turns out it’s not far from the truth. Viewed in isolation, Dumbo has always felt to me like a practice feature film from animators whose only previous experience was short subjects. Stork,” “Casey Junior”, “Circus Parade,” and the best of the lot, the rowdy “Song of the Roustabouts”). At a mere 64 minutes, Dumbo seems padded to barely feature length, stitched together from unrelated material better suited to individual cartoon shorts, including a string of early songs (“Look Out for Mr.
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