Oh man. Dumbo. Woof.
Another one I’ve never seen before and if I have, I can guess why I don’t remember it. Unfortunately, another product of its time. I was so uncomfortable the whole time watching this! The bullying, the racism, the problematic practices of a circus, the trippy drunken elephant dream. My god.
I will start this with something I liked. There is a small glimmer of good in this film. The best part about this movie was the equal parts beautiful and adorable relationship between cutie little Dumbo…ahem, excuse me, Jumbo Jr. and his mother, Mrs. Jumbo. (No Mr. Jumbo, by the way but 1940’s Disney isn’t about to have an unmarried elephant have a kid on her own!) The scene of Dumbo swinging in his mother’s trunk, reaching for her with his own trunk while the soft motherly tones of the song “Baby Mine,” brought a tear out of this viewer that hardly cries at anything in movies. It definitely made me think of and cherish my relationship with my own mom. She would definitely fight some punk a** kids should they ever harass me and make fun of my ears. Besides that, Dumbo got done dirty by his own movie. Poor kid doesn’t even fly until the last 4 minutes of the movie! But sure, let’s make a ride based on that entire premise.
I don’t need to go into the specifics of the issues with this one. We’re just going to chalk it up to what I said earlier. A product of its time. Plus, there isn’t very much “Disney Magic” to this one. It felt very rudimentary in every way. Story, visuals, characters, everything. It’s even short AF clocking in at just 1 hour, 4 minutes.
Upon some additional research, Dumbo was released to make up for the losses of its predecessors, Pinocchio and Fantasia. It was supposed to be low-budget and actually a cartoon short. Developing a simple story into a full length feature film isn’t easy, and it’s clear now that this production was plagued with problems and pressure that unfortunately, minds of 1940 had to solve. They weren’t thinking, “how do we make this timeless?” It was more, “how do we get this out the door and get our cash back?” Just write it, draw it, voice it, send it. No Disney magic, no fun, no fluff.
All that said, I do like the character of Dumbo. He’s a sweet innocent just trying to get by. He gets the last laugh in the end and we are left with the sweet notion that Dumbo and Mrs. Jumbo happily live as any circus animal can, but most importantly, together.
It is worth noting that modern Disney is CLEARLY aware of this film’s issues, and does not have it listed as one of its many tiles on the Disney Through the Decades section in Disney+’s search feature. The only way you can find this film is if you search manually and type in the title. The company clearly doesn’t want to actively promote this problematic film but had no problem making a live action version of it in 2019…go figure.
