directed by Ben Sharpsteen
written by Joe Grant and Dick Huemer
after the book Dumbo, the Flying Elephant by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl (1939)
64 min.
Movies like Dumbo are the reason that attributing a movie to the “director” and “writer” as above is silly. It implies that the director is the person most generally responsible for the creative quality of the finished product, but of course that’s not really how a movie like this is made. The credits for Dumbo also include “Directing Animators,” “Supervising Animators,” “Story Development,” and “Story Direction.” Many movies, but animated movies in particular and Dumbo moreso than other animated movies, are the products of large collaborations, where leadership only exists as an organizational necessity, not a creative reality.
That’s actually part of what I took away from this viewing. I had forgotten how short, how casual, and how varied Dumbo was. I don’t think any other animated feature is quite so blatantly composed of sequences that really look nothing like one another. Set pieces like the tent-raising, the circus parade, Casey Junior, and the pink elephants all look and feel like completely different films from one another, and all of them also like completely different films from the style of the “story” scenes. I had forgotten how flat and cheap those scenes look compared to the other early Disney films. Apparently Dumbo was intentionally made as quickly and easily as possible, and it shows, if you’re looking for it.
But that’s not a bad thing. Unlike Fantasia and Snow White, which aspire to fineness with a weirdly tangible fervency of purpose that I guess was Walt’s own, Dumbo feels like a feature-length effort – well, almost feature-length – by the same team of goofy guys who made all those Mickey Mouse shorts. It felt to me like a lower, jazzier art form than the shining thing Disney himself apparently envisioned, a form that was the direct descendent of “Steamboat Willie” and “Lonesome Ghosts” etc., without the intervention of “beauty” or “quality” in quotes. While Snow White has a whiff of the European and the literary about it, Dumbo is completely American and even retains a little of that bad-for-your-teeth quality that is so characteristic of early cartoons. People talk about how moving the “Baby Mine” sequence is, but they forget that when the camera takes time off from Jumbo and Jumbo Junior, it goes to cute “gag” shots of hyenas, hippos, etc. I thought of Gilbert Seldes’ “The Seven Lively Arts”: the lack of pretension makes it invigorating. The emotions are more poignant because they’re part of such an unassuming package. The movie wanders around with no interest in the laws of pacing, the animators do what they like until the story seems done, and then it’s done, 64 minutes later. I thought it was great.
The music is excellent; really, really good. That’s part of what makes the haphazard thing hang together – the music is doing something charming (and charmingly orchestrated) pretty much nonstop for all 64 minutes. Those male-chorus musical numbers made a huge impression on me as a child and that “Look Out For Mr. Stork” sound is still pretty much inseparable from the world of children’s books. I haven’t seen this movie in many years, but I’ve continued to hear the “Pink Elephants” instrumental running in my mind all that time. I should get this soundtrack album.
Now, I had thought for years that Dumbo was the first Disney feature based on an original story, but today I learn that I was wrong – Dumbo is based on the book Dumbo, the Flying Elephant, by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, published in 1939 by Roll-a-Book. Roll-a-Book was a novelty: the book was printed on a scroll in a box with a viewing window; you turned a wheel to progress the story. Naturally, when I heard about this, I thought, “I need a picture of that to put under the review!” But get this: NO COPIES ARE KNOWN TO HAVE SURVIVED. That’s right, the first edition of Dumbo is a completely lost item. If you’re like me, that makes you fantasize about finding it at a yard sale. Good luck, everyone!
Roll-a-Book appears in WorldCat only as 2 copies of a single title, Roll-a-Book for boys and girls No. 1 – The Lost Stone of Agog: A Fast Moving Adventure Story, featuring the Dare twins, by Gertrude Buckland Smith, with “roll-a-color illustrations” by Eleanor Schaefer. 22 cm. 1938. Mentioned nowhere else online. I’d love to see a picture of that, too.
However, a non-rolling edition of the original Dumbo was reprinted in 1941 prior to the release of the movie, apparently in a small run. A thorough summary with a good amount of the text is available here. Anyone got an image? I’d be much obliged.