Dumbo starts with a bunch of storks bringing down baby animals to a bunch of circus animals. All at once. There’s like a huge army of storks delivering babies to everyone. Imagine growing up and everyone has the same birthday. The insanity!
Anyway, one of the babies is an elephant with big ears. Then these other elephants, like adult female elephants, start making fun of this baby, calling him “Dumbo.” They’re just being complete assholes to a fuckin baby! Pisses me off. At least Dumbo’s mom slams the door in their stupid faces. Dumbo’s mom is pretty cool, not taking their shit.
Dumbo’s cute, but he’s always getting laughed at because of his big ears. Some jerkoff kid even pulls and pushes Dumbo, and yells in his ear. When his mom tries to defend her son, she gets locked chained up in a tiny train car in isolation. The movie is about the circus, and kinda some of the shittiness of being in a circus. It’s not a huge theme throughout, but I think it’s there, the unfair treatment of circuses. It’s just not particularly relevant in our society, I think. Maybe I’m out of touch, though. Maybe circuses are hugely relevant somewhere. I don’t fucking know.
Then Dumbo meets this mouse with a Brooklyn [?] accent. Some kind of accent. He scares off those bitchy lady elephants and befriends Dumbo. He accepts Dumbo for who he is and encourages him. He’s a pretty good character. He kinda plays a similar role to Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, but Jiminy was way better at it. Speaking of Pinocchio, that had over twice the budget of Dumbo, and it shows. Dumbo just doesn’t have the richness, the depth, or the artistic quality. It’s simpler in every way. It’s not bad, but it’s not anything incredible.
There’s a scene where Dumbo visits his mom when she’s locked up, and it’s kind of emotional. They show all the other animals with their mothers, but Dumbo can’t really visit her. She’s still locked up. It’s sad. But, you know, the characters are just kinda okay, so it definitely could’ve been an even better scene with more budget and a longer movie.
The best scene, of course, is the “Pink Elephants on Parade” song. Dumbo and the mouse guy kinda accidentally get drunk, and Dumbo hallucinates, for some reason. This scene is so ahead of its time. It’s so psychedelic, you’d think it would be from 1967, but it’s from 1941!
When Dumbo and the mouse guy wake up, they’re greeted by a group of crows. These crows are obviously meant to represent African-Americans, and to me it seems really racially insensitive. But, looking at the Wikipedia, I guess there’s some debate about it. I’m not really the one to have the final authority on the matter at all.
But they give Dumbo a “magic feather,” which allows him to fly. In the end, he loses the feather, but he can still fly, so he realizes it was really just him all along! And it was his ears, which had caused him such anguish earlier, that allowed him to fly! It’s a movie about loving yourself, kind of. A lot of us have our own “big ears” that we have to accept of ourselves.
This movie could’ve really used a villain. There’s a few asshole characters, but if they had developed the ringleader as a true villain, that would’ve made it a lot better. Oh well, can’t change it now!
Lefty Forrester 