Dumbo

On the data. Two films, and the gap between them is seventy-eight years. The 1941 film exists because Disney was in trouble. Pinocchio and Fantasia had both been expensive and both had lost money, and Europe, which was most of the overseas market, was at war and closed. Dumbo was made fast and cheap on purpose: simple watercolour backgrounds, a small cast, and sixty-four minutes, which is so short that RKO asked Disney to pad it out and Disney refused. It worked. It was the only Disney feature of that period to turn a clear profit on first release. Two things in it are worth knowing before you put it on. The Pink Elephants on Parade sequence is a hallucination, it comes out of nowhere, and it frightens small children far more reliably than anything else in the film. And the crows in the last act are performed as a Black minstrel act, with the lead crow originally named Jim Crow and voiced by a white actor. Disney+ carries a content warning on the film and does not edit it, which is the right way round. The 2019 remake drops the crows entirely. The story came from a very short children's book by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, sold as a Roll-a-Book, a toy that displayed the pages on rollers. Almost nobody has seen one. Disney bought it before it had really been published. The 2019 film is a different shape. The original is about an elephant and his mother and runs out of story at exactly the right moment. Burton's keeps that for an hour and then starts a second film about a theme park owner, with Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito, that the first one never needed.

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