How Disney turned a children’s book about a flying elephant into one of its most successful films
ALTHOUGH we think of Disney as the major player in animation films today, there was a time when it took an elephant to save it.
Seventy five years ago this week Disney’s studios released a film about a big-eared flying elephant that soared to new heights of success.
Dumbo is considered among the best of Disney’s films and one of the greatest animated features of all time.
Born out of desperation, it wasn’t without controversy when it was released in 1941.
At the beginning of the 1940s Disney’s animation studio was in trouble. Founder Walt Disney had seen major success with his feature-length animated masterpiece Snow White in 1937, but his next films Pinnochio and Fantasia were expensive flops.
Both films used labour-intensive methods such as oil-painted backdrops, consuming a large amount of the studio’s resources.
Pinnochio had good reviews but when it was released in February 1940, the war in Europe shut off the film from potential European markets. Fantasia also flopped, partly because it was considered too artsy for animation audiences but also because of the war.
Disney already had Bambi in production, but it was costly and progress was slow. He shelved other more expensive projects such as adaptations of Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan and looked for something cheaper, simpler and faster and would also connect with the audience in a way that neither of his previous films had.
He found the perfect material in a humble children’s story written by Helen Aberson and illustrated by Harold Pearl and published in 1938.
It was about a young large-eared circus elephant dubbed Jumbo because of his large ears, but who is later given the name Dumbo when he trips on his ears and wrecks the elephant act.
Relegated to being part of a clown act, the elephant is rescued from this fate with the help of a robin named Red.
The bird teaches the elephant to fly and to gain acceptance at the circus. Disney snapped up the rights, initially seeing it as a 30-minute short. He later saw its greater potential and asked one of his producers, Ben Sharpsteen, to expand it into a longer feature. Disney put his best writers, Joe Grant and Dick Huemer, to work on the project.
The writers stuck largely to Aberson’s story but in development they tweaked a few things. The mother elephant, named Ella in the book, became simply Mrs Jumbo and the robin became Timothy the mouse. They also introduced the famous Pink Elephants on Parade dream sequence, in which Dumbo and Timothy hallucinate they are seeing pink elephants after accidentally getting drunk.
Animators were told to keep costs low. Backgrounds were painted as watercolours and artists tried to keep only a few characters on screen. There were also some clever cost-cutting measures that added to the artistry of the film. In one scene a group of clowns are seen only as shadows on a tent, as Dumbo and Timothy listen in. In the Pink Elephants sequence there are single colour backgrounds.
Dumbo doesn’t speak so there was no need to cast a voice actor for the lead. None of the other actors were A-list stars. Timothy was voiced by Edward Brophy, best known for playing gangsters, a relative unknown. While animators on Pinnochio, Fantasia or Bambi only created three or four animation cells a day, those working on Dumbo were painting 120 to 140. The project hit a snag with an animators strike (which is parodied in Dumbo when the clowns go to ask their boss for a raise).
The film opened on October 23, 1941. While Disney’s studio may have skimped on the production, including the length (it was only 64 minutes long), they packed in plenty of emotion and pathos. Critics loved it and so did audiences, who liked the tale of the misfit elephant finding his talent and along with it gaining fame and affection.
The film was banned in Boston because it was thought the crow characters were a negative stereotype of African-Americans. One of the characters was named Jim Crow, the name of a character created by white minstrels wearing blackface that had become widely applied to the system of treating African-Americans like second class citizens. The film lived down the controversy and put Disney’s studio into a financially healthy position.