Dumbo (1941 film)

Dumbo is a 1941 American animated film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released on October 23, 1941, by RKO Radio Pictures before the Attack on Pearl Harbor. Sound was recorded conventionally using the RCA System. One voice was synthesized using the Sonovox system, but it, too, was recorded using the RCA System.

As the fourth animated feature in the Disney Animated Canon, Dumbo is based upon the book written by Helen Aberson and illustrated by Harold Pearl for the prototype of a novelty toy ("Roll-a-Book"). The main character is "Dumbo". He is laughed at for his big ears, but in fact he is capable of flying by using his ears as wings. Throughout most of the film, his only true friend, aside from his mother, is a mouse, Timothy — a relationship parodying the stereotypical animosity between mice and elephants.

Dumbo was made to recoup the financial losses of Pinocchio and Fantasia. It was a deliberate pursuit of simplicity and economy for the Disney studio, and at 64 minutes, it is one of Disney's shortest full length features. Saludos Amigos in 1942 is the shortest, running at 42 minutes. Fortunately, it was a box office hit and became iconic for WWII as it was hailed by critics and audiences as a joyous film, appropriate for such vulgar times. Unfortunately, however, its performance was hindered by the outbreak of war in America, following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Today, the film is one of the most acclaimed animated movies of all time, often called the best in the medium. It is also known for being John Lasseter's favorite movie, and it is among one of Walt Disney's favorites. It is also a favorite of film historian/critic Leonard Maltin.

Story
The film takes place in a circus setting in Florida, possibly in present-day 1941, and starts with a formation of storks delivering newborn babies to various circus animals. Mrs. Jumbo's baby is delivered to her belatedly by an exhausted stork, and the baby elephant is well received by the other elephants - until the size of his ears are revealed after he sneezes. The elephant, nicknamed "Dumbo" is teased by the sarcastic female elephants. The mother ignores them, however, until Mrs. Jumbo is imprisoned as a "mad elephant" after trying to defend her son from a crowd of antagonizing boys. A mouse named Timothy befriends Dumbo, and crafts a plan to make the sorrowful little elephant a star in the circus.

Timothy subliminally convinces The Ringmaster (in his sleep) to set up a "pyramid of pachyderms," to the top of which Dumbo will jump (using a springboard). Due to Dumbo's long ears, the act fails, the big top falls to the ground, the other elephants are injured, the circus has to relocate, and Dumbo is unceremoniously reduced to a clown. Dumbo's clown act involves falling from an enormous platform in a dramatized fire rescue into a vat of pie filling. The audience responds well to the act, and the clowns decide to alter the act for the next show so that Dumbo will fall from a platform many times higher than the original one.

After an emotional visit to his mother's cell, Timothy tries to cheer up Dumbo, who could not stop crying. They settle down for a drink of water outside of the clowns' tent. Unknown to them, the water has been accidentally spiked with champagne by the clowns, and the elephant and Timothy become inebriated and halluncinatory, seeing Pink Elephants sing and dance before their eyes.

Dumbo and Timothy awake the next morning—in a tree over 100 feet up, awoken by a gaggle of amused crows. Timothy guesses that Dumbo flew them to the top of the tree while they were drunk, an idea that the crows find hilarious. After Timothy tells them Dumbo's pitiful story, the crows decide to help Timothy teach Dumbo to fly. They convincing the elephant that he can fly with the use of a "magic feather," and succeed in getting him to fly.

Dumbo shows up at his next clown performance with his magic feather; however, he loses the feather after leaping from the platform. Timothy admits to Dumbo that he can fly without the magic feather, and, barely avoiding death from the fall, Dumbo opens his ears and soars through the air, to the amazement of the audience. Dumbo the Flying Elephant is made a star of the circus and an international celebrity, and he and his mother are finally reunited and given their own private coach on Casey Junior, the circus train.

Cast

 * Edward Brophy as Timothy Q. Mouse
 * Verna Felton as Elephant Matriarch, Mrs. Jumbo and Dumbo
 * Cliff Edwards as Jim Crow
 * Herman Bing as The Ringmaster
 * Margaret Wright as Casey Junior
 * Sterling Holloway as Mr. Stork
 * Hall Johnson Choir as Crow Chorus
 * Noreen Gammill as Elephant Catty
 * Dorothy Scott as Elephant Giddy
 * Sarah Selby as Elephant Prissy
 * Malcolm Hutton as Smitty
 * John McLeish as the narrator
 * Billy Bletcher as Clowns

Production of Dumbo
The film was designed as an economical feature, to help generate income for the Disney studio after the financial failures of both Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940. Storymen Dick Huemer and Joe Grant were the primary figures in developing the plot, based upon a manuscript written by Helen Aberson and Harold Perl for a children's book.

When the film went into production in early 1941, supervising director Ben Sharpsteen was given orders to keep the film simple and inexpensive. As a result, Dumbo lacks the lavish detail of the previous three Disney animated features (Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). Character designs are simpler, background paintings are less detailed, and a number of cels (or frames) were used in the character animation. However, the simplicity freed the animators from being overly concerned with detail, and allowed them to focus on the most important element of character animation: acting. Bill Tytla's animation of Dumbo is today considered one of the greatest accomplishments in American traditional animation.

On May 29, 1941, during the production on Dumbo, much of the Disney studio staff went on strike. The strike lasted five weeks, and ended the family atmosphere and camaraderie at the studio. A number of the strikers are caricatured into this film as the clowns who want to put Dumbo at risk for their own gain and go to hit the big boss for a raise.

Timothy Mouse was voiced by Edward Brophy, a character actor known for portraying gangsters who has no other known animation voice credits. The pompous matriarch of the elephants was voiced by Verna Felton, who would later play the Fairy Godmother from Cinderella and Flora from Sleeping Beauty. Other voice actors include the perennial Sterling Holloway in a cameo role as Mr. Stork, and Cliff Edwards, better previously known for voicing Jiminy Cricket, as Jim Crow, the leader of the crows.

To save costs, watercolor paint was used to render the backgrounds. Dumbo and Snow White are the only two classic Disney features to use the technique, which was regularly employed for the various Disney animated shorts. The other Disney features used oil paint and gouache. 2002's Lilo &amp; Stitch, a simple, emotional story with influences from Dumbo, also made use of watercolor backgrounds.

Trivia

 * Spike.com ranks the circus 6th in their list The Top 10 Hollywood Villains Who Got Totally Screwed under the section What people Forget it quotes Wikipedia saying Despite their popularity in zoos… elephants are among the world's most dangerous animals. They can crush and kill any other land animal, even the rhinoceros. They can experience unexpected bouts of rage, and can be vindictive.
 * In Spielberg's 1979 movie, 1941, a few clips of Dumbo were seen in a theater, where General Stillwell (played by Robert Stack) goes to, since 1941 was the year Dumbo was released.
 * Story men Joe Grant and Dick Huemer wrote up the film as installments which they left on Walt's desk every morning. After reading them, he would run into the story department saying, "This is great! What happens next?"
 * The movie is considered to be "The most emotional film In Disney history".
 * It was the first Walt Disney animated feature to be set in America, and the first movie for Sterling Holloway (the Stork) and Verna Felton (the Elephant Matriarch/Mrs. Jumbo). Both would become regulars in Disney animated films for the next thirty-five years.
 * The movie was the first Walt Disney Animated Classic to be released on videocassette. Its first video release was in 1981 for rental only, and put on sale in the summer of 1982. It was then repackaged in 1985 and 1989 and again in 1994. Then it was first released on DVD in 2001 and again in 2006, and the newest release in 2011. Dumbo has never gone out of print, thus considered the longest Disney animated feature on video to be in print since it came out. It is also the top film that has been re-realesed on DVD and VHS in movie history.
 * The name of the circus (seen on a sign as the train leaves the winter headquarters) is WDP Circus (Walt Disney Productions).
 * A direct-to-video sequel was in production but was cancelled due to John Lasseter putting an end to the practice of direct-to-video sequels. Some of the backgrounds were used in The Fox and the Hound 2.
 * This is the sixth Disney animated classic to have the 2006 Walt Disney Pictures logo at the end of the movie, on current releases.

Release and reaction
Dumbo was completed and delivered to Disney's distributor, RKO Radio Pictures, in fall 1941. RKO balked at the fact that the film only ran 64 minutes, and demanded that Walt Disney either:


 * (a.) expand it to 70 minutes or more


 * (b.) edit it to short subject length


 * or (c.) allow RKO to release it as a B-movie.

Disney refused all three options, and RKO reluctantly issued Dumbo, unaltered, as an A-film.

After its October 31 release, Dumbo proved to be a financial success. The simple film only cost $813,000 to produce, half the cost of Snow White and less than a third of the cost of Pinocchio. Dumbo eventually grossed $1.3 million during its original release; it and Snow White were the only two pre-1943 Disney features to turn a profit (Barrier, 318). The United States entered World War II in December 1941, reducing the box office draw of the film, which was nevertheless the most financially successful Disney film of the 1940s, thanks to a 1949 rerelease.

Dumbo won the 1941 Academy Award for Original Music Score, awarded to musical directors Frank Churchill & Oliver Wallace. Churchill and lyricist Ned Washington were nominated for the 1941 Academy Award for Best Song for Baby Mine, the song that plays during Dumbo's visit to his mother's cell. The film also won Best Animation Design at the 1947 Cannes Film Festival.

The film's simplicity and charm have made it the favorite Disney film of many people, including film and animation historian Leonard Maltin. Of particular note is the Pink Elephants on Parade sequence, which depicts Dumbo and Timothy's drunken hallucinations. The sequence was the first venture into surrealism for a narrative Disney film, taking its cue from the experimental Fantasia. The sequence essentially breaks all of the "rules" that the Disney animators had lived by for creating realistic animation over the previous decade: pink, polka-dot, and plaid elephants dance, sing, and morph into an number of various objects. The design of the sequence is highly stylized, and many of the artists who worked on it were the younger artists at the studio who joined the picket line in May 1941 and eventually would become the nucleus of United Productions of America, the most influential animation studio of the 1950s.

The crow characters in the film are in fact African-American caricatures; the leader crow voiced by Caucasian Cliff Edwards is officially named Jim Crow. The other crows are voiced by African-American actors, all members of the Hall Johnson Choir. Though Dumbo is often criticized for the inclusion of the black crows, it is notable that they are the only truly sympathetic characters in the film outside of Dumbo, his mother and Timothy. They apologize for picking on the elephant, and they are in fact the ones that help Timothy teach Dumbo to fly. The roustabout scene which features African American laborers largely in shadow and singing a working song that many find offensive has drawn similar complaints.

The film received another distinction of note in 1980, when it was the first of Disney's canon of animated films to be released on home video.

Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 97% of the critics gave the film a positive review based on 37 reviews.

Worldwide release dates

 * Brazil: November 17, 1941
 * Nicaragua: December 24, 1941
 * United Kingdom: February 8, 1942
 * Canada: March 31, 1942
 * Chile: May 23, 1942
 * Australia: June 4, 1942
 * Ireland: June 5, 1942
 * Mexico: July 9, 1942
 * Argentina: August 10, 1942
 * Uruguay: September 2, 1942 (Montevideo)
 * Portugal: November 30, 1942
 * Spain: September 25, 1944 (Madrid), December 14, 1944 (Barcelona)
 * Sweden: September 16, 1946
 * Belgium: April 25, 1947
 * France: October 9, 1947 (Paris); October 25, 1947 (general release)
 * Norway: December 26, 1947
 * Denmark: June 25, 1948
 * Hong Kong: August 19, 1948
 * Colombia: September 16, 1948
 * Finland: October 1, 1948
 * Italy: October 2, 1948
 * Poland: October 23, 1949
 * Netherlands: July 25, 1951
 * West Germany: April 8, 1952
 * Austria: May 22, 1953
 * Japan: March 12, 1954
 * Philippines: September 28, 1955 (Davao)
 * Lebanon: May 14, 1968
 * Kuwait: October 14, 1986
 * China: July 12, 1989 (Beijing)

Difference Between the Film and the Novel
In the original story, Mrs. Jumbo's original name was Ella. She wasn't locked away after defending her son from some bullies. A character named Jack the elephant trainer would announce the pyramid of pachyderms, not the Ringmaster. Timothy Mouse was originally Red the Robin. There was also Professor Hoot Owl, who taught him how to fly instead of the Crows. Ella named her baby just Jumbo, not Jumbo Jr. The Gossipy Elephants praised him for his big ears instead of shunning him. Dumbo was thrown into a donkey car by Jack and the Ringmaster, and on his pail they've crossed out J into a D for Dumbo, different from the elephants immediately renaming him Dumbo. He does talk in the novel, but not the film.

Proposed Sequel

 * In 2001, the "60th Anniversary Edition" VHS and DVD of Dumbo featured a sneak peek of Dumbo II, including new character designs and storyboards. Robert C. Ramirez (Joseph: King of Dreams) was to direct the sequel, in which Dumbo and his circus friends navigated a large city after being left behind by their traveling circus. Dumbo II also sought to explain what happened to Dumbo's father, Mr. Jumbo. Dumbo's circus friends included the chaotic twin bears Claude and Lolly, the curious zebra Dot, the older, independent hippo Godfry, and the adventurous ostrich Penny. The animals were metaphors for the different stages of childhood. Dumbo II was supposed to be set on the day immediately following the end of the first Dumbo movie. John Lasseter cancelled Dumbo II soon after being named Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2006.

Other appearances
Dumbo appears in the first Kingdom Hearts game as a summon spell. When Sora is riding him, Dumbo is invulnerable and sprays water at the enemies (which counts as ice magic). When the time limit expires, Dumbo disappears. Sometimes Dumbo's friend Timothy help play the tuba in the Mickey Mouse Revue.

Dumbo makes a cameo appearance in the Toy Shop in The Great Mouse Detective as a toy that blows bubbles from his nose.

Gallery
Dumbo (película)