Directed by Ben Sharpsteen. Edward Brophy, Sterling Holloway, Herman Bing, Cliff Edwards, Verna Felton. Disney.
Decent Films Ratings
| Overall Recommendability |
?C+ |
|---|---|
| Artistic/ Entertainment Value |
? |
| Moral/Spiritual Value (+4/-4) |
? -1 |
| Age Appropriateness |
?Kids & Up* |
External Ratings
| MPAA | ?G | USCCB | ?A-I |
|---|
Content advisory: Comic accidental inebriation; mildly ominous imagery; tragic themes.
From a National Catholic Register review
By Steven D. Greydanus
Somebody has to say it: Made at the height of Disney’s early brilliance alongside Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Bambi, Dumbo is the odd weak link in the chain.
True, the surreal “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence is justly celebrated, and the title character — unique among Disney heroes for his silence — is among the more expressive and charming early Disney heroes. Yet as a film Dumbo is thin and unsatisfying, lacking the coming-of-age richness of Bambi, the visual artistry of Pinocchio or Fantasia, and the thematic heft of Snow White.
At a mere 64 minutes, Dumbo seems padded to barely feature length, stitched together from unrelated material better suited to individual cartoon shorts, including a string of early songs (“Look Out for Mr. Stork,” “Casey Junior” [which morphs into “Little Engine that Could”], “Circus Parade,” and the best of the lot, the rowdy “Song of the Roustabouts”). Viewed in isolation, Dumbo feels like a practice feature film from animators whose only previous experience was short subjects.
From the first scenes, Uncle Walt plucks the heartstrings more shamelessly than in any other early feature. After all the other animal mothers already have their babies, lonely, homely Mrs. Jumbo’s bundle of joy is finally delivered by a late Mr. Stork (Sterling Holloway). (There’s an odd disconnect between the onscreen maternal joy of all the mothers with their babies and the vaguely fatalistic lyrics of “Look Out for Mr. Stork,” which seem to imply a wish to avoid the stork.)
Then comes the shock and shame of the enormous ears. Mrs. Jumbo and her fellow circus pachyderms, with their small ears, are clearly Indian elephants, but Mr. Jumbo, wherever he is (little Dumbo is initially named Jumbo Jr. after his presumptive father, but neither he nor any other bull elephants are in evidence anywhere), would seem to be a large-eared African elephant, and even that wouldn’t fully explain Dumbo’s unusual pinnal condition.
Dumbo’s ears not only earn him derision and ridicule from Mrs. Jumbo’s catty, stuck-up fellow elephant cows, they also make him the object of unwelcome attention from young circus spectators, ultimately leading, in a maudlin plot twist crueler than the death of Bambi’s mother, to Dumbo’s separation from his protective mother, who is slapped into solitary confinement in a circus trailer as a “mad elephant.”
At least Bambi’s mother only died, and Bambi was allowed to grieve offscreen in a two-year flash-forward as he was raised by his father. And he didn’t have to deal with feeling that it was his fault. Dumbo, by contrast, is left alone, or rather left to the company of Timothy Q. Mouse (Edward Brophy), a relation of Jiminy Cricket and every other diminutive Disney sidekick (if more engaging than most, possibly even Jiminy himself). Still, in all the annals of Disney animation, is there any tearjerking more unblushing than the sequence in which the chained Mrs. Jumbo reaches her trunk through the bars of her cage to nuzzle and rock her son?
And it doesn’t end there. After failure as a performing elephant, Dumbo endures a frightening, bewildering stint as a clown and further rejection by the herd (“From now on, he is no longer an elephant”) before getting accidentally inebriated, ironically unleashing his unknown strength.
The “Pink Elephants” number, followed by the jumping “When I See an Elephant Fly,” ends the film on a high note, but little Dumbo’s revenge on the elephantine shrews and his reunion with his mother in the final seconds of the film are too little, too late.
