Part 24: Dumbo
Release Date: 1941
Director: Ben Sharpsteen

We are living in the year 2009. Things have changed in the animation world since Walt Disney help revolutionize it. First off you have most of the animated films be completely computer generated. It's the style that'll live with us for now, as hand drawn animation is slowly fading away. But when films are actually animated by human beings, they are still vastly different then the old days of the industry. Everything is very detailed and beautiful to look at. You have people now working on individual parts of a cel then actually doing the whole animation. It's a lot of work but most of the time the film ends up looking very beautiful. But you don't always have to be the most detailed animator to make a classic film. Walt Disney and his crew showed us that with his 1941 release of Dumbo.

The running time of the feature should tell you right away that this is a very 'cheap' film. It's barely an hour long and the budget didn't call for it to be epic as Disney's earlier work. In fact this had the lowest budget for a Disney film, with it not even hitting the million dollar mark. The reason for this was because their previous films; Pinocchio and Fantasia; lost money for the company. So the peice had to be done with a very low budget (even for today's standards) and animators were told not to worry to much on the details. The results? Backgrounds are done by watercolor because anything else would be too expensive. Much of the background in general are simple and doesn't have nearly as much going on in them. Even the people that watch the circus preformers aren't even drawn all the way; they are mainly in the shadows.

There is no reason to think though that this is a bad film. It's not, if it was then why would I be talking about it? What makes this a great film to watch is because how simple it looks. Not everything is simple though as the main characters look great. Dumbo looks like an elephant and acts like one, and even though the mouse (Timothy) walks and talks like a human he still looks like a mouse. You can really appreciate the animation even if there are some liberties taken with it. Simple is better to me, I can't explain it but it makes this film much more enjoyable to watch. Heck I love it that the crowd is in the shadows the whole time. It adds a nice touch cause honestly, you wouldn't be seeing most of the crowd anyway cause a circus tent is a dark arena. One segment of the entire film, I think, makes this film for what it is. It defines on how simple this animation is but shows how the animators worked around this constraint.

That would be the incredible 'Pink Elephants on Parade' segment. When Dumbo and Timothy accidentally drinks some alcohol, they hallucinate. Obviously they imagine pink elephants, cause they are the universal sign for being drunk. Why that is, I have no clue. Maybe this film invented the concept. Anyways, I love it on how creative the sequence is. It uses the budget to it's advantage as they can create an elaborate musical number with just simple looking elephants. Plus their imagination goes wild as there are some crazy things going on in this. It is my duty to show you just how great this segment is, so I say enjoy to you good people.

Dumbo might not be an epic peice of animation like other Disney films. But it has a quality to it that can't match other films today. I have yet to see an animated film, which had a low budget as well, be such as good as this film is. What does it hurt to watch a children's film about a small elephant? It's only an hour long and it's a good quality hour at that. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to be humming that 'Pink Elephants on Parade' song for the next couple of weeks.

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