Grab a bag of peanuts for this one, and enjoy the ride, because it's over much too soon. Dumbo gets a boost, too, from a merry band of crows, who are a spirited bunch, but the animation treads perilously close to trafficking in Stepin Fetchit stereotypes of African Americans.īut goodness knows these aren't as egregious as some of the stuff you'll find in the long-suppressed Song of the South, and looking to hash out the politics of a movie like Dumbo cannot be time well spent. (It's got nothing on the opening moments of Bambi, though.) The animation is extraordinarily lush throughout, and perhaps the most notable sequence is when Dumbo and Timothy accidentally imbibe champagne, leading to a drunken, surrealistic parade of pink elephants, plaid elephants, elephants of every shape and color and size-a discussion about the hallucinatory powers of alcohol may not be what you had in mind for after the movie, but be prepared. He helps our hero find his way in the world, and eventually turns Dumbo's most notable feature from a negative to a positive-it's hard not to read this as a parable for those kids who are just a little bit different in some respect, and gives the comforting notion that we can all find our place in this world.Īs so many of the classic Disney films are, this one is at its heart a parent/child story, and though of course it ends well, it could still provoke some anxiety over issues of abandonment. Mouse, cut from the same bolt of cloth as Jiminy Cricket. So our friend Dumbo is all alone in the world, but, this being a Disney movie, he makes his one necessary friend-here it's Timothy Q. This last becomes problematic, for Dumbo's mother stomps to his defense-what we know is the maternal instinct gets interpreted as a stampeding, irrational pachyderm, leading to her quarantine. Mom loves him, no matter what he looks like-moms are like that, especially in Disney movies-but the sweet mute little guy takes heaps of abuse, from a passel of gossipy elephants, from other animals, and from little kids. All is bliss between mother and child, and then the other elephants get a peek at the freakishly huge ears on the boy. Better late than never, though-a tardy stork comes through with a baby elephant, and he's got the doe eyes of the cutest little puppy you've ever seen. Cute little pups and cubs get deposited by an army of storks to all the mommies in the circus-no fear of a talk about the birds and the bees here-but left out, sadly, is a hopeful mother elephant. To begin with, the movie revels in the magic of the circus-it's not a seedy place of dark characters and questionable morals (as is, say, the circus in A Bug's Life), but rather it's an anthropomorphic animals' paradise, in which all are pleased to perform, and even more pleased for the annual visit from the stork. The extras package reveals that, as animated features go, this one was done in a hurry, and perhaps that accounts for its success-nothing here feels overthought or unreasonably schematic, and it clocks in at just over an hour, so even the smallest among us with their wee little attention spans will hang with this one.
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