Watchin' Disney #04: Dumbo

Here's a little movie about an elephant with big ears.

Previous relationship with movie: I'm not sure if I have ever seen Dumbo. I thought I'd seen it; I remembered it starting out with baby Dumbo hatching from an egg. Then he is made to work in the circus where he gets teased by the other elephant children for his big ears, and he doesn't like it so he flies to the city. City life is too hard for Dumbo, so he flies back to the circus and becomes a star for his big ears and everyone loves him. As I found out from watching the movie, pretty much all of this was wrong. So, I don't know if I've ever actually watched it. I've also never seen Dumbo's Circus.

So I watched it: Dumbo is actually pretty ridiculous. There's a scene where the circus ringmaster makes all of the elephants stack up in a pyramid. I dunno man, if I saw a bunch of elephants stacked on top of each other in real life, all standing on their feet and practically reaching the roof, I'd be terrified. I wouldn't think it was a cool circus trick at all. The whole movie kind of exists in a sort of believable/cartoony mix. So it's weird, you're watching a movie about a flying elephant and you have to remind yourself that it's a cartoon. But hey, these guys were pretty much inventing animated movies, so you gotta cut them some slack.

Dumbo reminds me a lot of Pinocchio, and not just because it has a mentor mouse in the Jiminy Cricket role. Like Pinocchio, it has a pretty insane story that is paced so bizarrely. For example, this movie is 64 minutes long, and you don't actually see Dumbo fly until about 60 minutes in. It works well within the movie, but it's still weird to watch a movie about a flying elephant and see a total four minutes of flying. Only Operation Dumbo Drop has a lower flying elephant time to total running time ratio in the history of movies called Dumbo. Oh, also there's a scene in Dumbo where Dumbo and his mouse friend get drunk and have visions of dancing elephants, and that takes up like five minutes (out of 64 minutes). And then there are the vaguely-racist crows. Anyway I liked Dumbo. I don't know how I'd rank it against the rest of the Disney movies so far, but I liked it. This also has the best songs in a Disney movie so far, "Casey Junior" is going to be playing in my head for weeks.

Up next: Bambi, let's see how that goes.