A Small Film and a Big One
The 1941 Dumbo is a small, fast, cheap film.
That turned out to be its strength. It tells a simple story in just over an hour: a baby elephant with enormous ears is mocked by everyone around him, separated from his mother and humiliated in the circus, until he discovers that the ears everyone laughed at can make him fly. It’s funny, strange and heartbreaking, and every scene serves the story. Nothing is there for decoration, and nothing outstays its welcome.
Tim Burton’s 2019 remake is almost twice as long, cost well over a hundred million dollars and loses the thread almost immediately. It keeps the flying elephant and builds a human drama around him, and the drama isn’t very interesting. Comparing the two is a lesson in how a story can be enlarged until it disappears, and in how much a small budget can force a filmmaker to focus.
I think the 1941 Dumbo is close to perfect, and I get angrier about the remake the longer I think about it. Burton had well over a hundred million dollars to play with, and he spent it burying a baby elephant under a human family nobody asked for. The original did more with watercolor backgrounds and a mouse.
Dumbo (1941). 10/10
10 / 10
Ben Sharpsteen supervised the original, released in October 1941. Disney needed money after Pinocchio and Fantasia both lost heavily at the box office, and Disney planned Dumbo from the start as a short, inexpensive feature. The backgrounds are simple watercolors, the animators drew the characters in a rounder, looser style than the lavish earlier films, and the story is stripped to the bone.
It was a hit, and it saved the studio at a difficult moment. Critics loved it, audiences adored the little elephant, and Time magazine reportedly planned to feature Dumbo on its cover as the mammal of the year, a plan abandoned after the attack on Pearl Harbor that December. I give it a 10. It’s short, and there isn’t a wasted minute. The whole film feels like a single breath.
A Mother Taken Away
The story begins with storks delivering babies to the animals of a traveling circus, and Mrs. Jumbo’s baby arrives late.
When she sees his huge ears, the other elephants sneer and nickname him Dumbo. Mrs. Jumbo loves him completely. When a group of boys torments him, she loses her temper to protect him, and the circus locks her away as a mad elephant.
Everything that follows comes from that separation. Dumbo is alone, mocked by the other elephants and pushed into humiliating circus acts. The film never lets us forget that he’s a baby who has lost his mother, and the emotional logic of the whole story rests on his longing to get her back.
It’s an extraordinarily simple setup, and it works because the film never looks away from the pain. Children watching understand immediately what Dumbo has lost, and adults feel it just as sharply. Mrs. Jumbo’s cry as she’s dragged away, and the sign on her wagon reading Mad Elephant, are among the saddest images in any Disney film.
Baby Mine
The film’s emotional high point is Baby Mine. Timothy, the mouse who has become Dumbo’s friend and manager, takes him at night to the wagon where his mother is chained. She can’t see him, but she reaches out through the bars with her trunk, cradles him and rocks him while a lullaby plays. Around the circus, other mothers hold their babies.
Disney has animated nothing more heartbreaking, and the scene uses almost no dialogue. The song, by Frank Churchill and Ned Washington, received an Oscar nomination, and the film’s score won the award outright. Generations of viewers remember crying at this scene as children, and many still cry at it as adults.
What makes it work is restraint. Mrs. Jumbo is barely visible, only her trunk through the bars. The film trusts the gesture and the music to convey the feeling, and they do. Nothing is explained, and nothing needs to be. Every viewer knows exactly what that trunk through the bars means.
That scene is the reason the 1941 film gets a 10 from me. It puts a lump in my throat, and I don’t want it to stop. A chained mother, a trunk through the bars and a lullaby say more about love than most live-action dramas manage in two hours.
For Writers
Mrs. Jumbo is barely visible in Baby Mine, only her trunk through the bars. The film trusts one gesture and one song to convey the scene’s emotion.
When you write your most emotional moment, less is usually more. A single precise gesture can carry more feeling than a page of description or dialogue.
Find the one physical action at the center of your most emotional scene, and build the scene around it. Cut everything that explains what the reader should feel.
Pink Elephants on Parade
Then the film does something nobody expects. Dumbo and Timothy accidentally drink from a bucket of water spiked with champagne, and Dumbo hallucinates. For several minutes, the story stops, and the screen fills with surreal pink elephants marching, dancing, stretching, melting and transforming into other shapes against a black background.
Pink Elephants on Parade is the strangest sequence in any Disney film of the era, closer to avant-garde animation than to a children’s cartoon, and it’s brilliant. The animators, freed from the constraints of the story, experimented with color, shape and movement in ways the studio rarely allowed. It’s the part of the film most people remember after the lullaby.
The sequence also has a purpose, though it takes a moment to see it. Dumbo and Timothy wake up in a tree, with no idea how they got there, and the crows who find them suggest the obvious explanation: Dumbo flew. The dream sequence that seemed like a detour turns out to be the moment the story finds its answer.
After Baby Mine it’s my favorite stretch of the film, and what delights me is that the nightmare turns out to be how Dumbo learns to fly. I’d happily watch another five minutes of those melting elephants.
For Writers
Pink Elephants on Parade stops the story completely for a surreal hallucination. The film’s biggest risk is also one of its most memorable sequences.
If your story has a consistent tone, consider allowing one scene to break it entirely, a dream, a vision, a flashback, and make that scene serve the plot in the end.
A story that’s simple and tightly controlled can afford one wild departure from its style. The contrast makes the departure unforgettable and everything around it feel grounded.
The Crows and the Roustabouts
The crows who help Dumbo discover he can fly are the film’s most debated element. They’re drawn and voiced as caricatures of Black Americans, and the lead crow was called Jim Crow in production materials. They sing When I See an Elephant Fly, a clever, jazzy number, and they’re the only characters apart from Timothy who are kind to Dumbo.
The film also contains the Song of the Roustabouts, where faceless Black workers raise the circus tent in the rain while singing lyrics that are painful to hear now. Disney added a content advisory to the film on its streaming service, acknowledging the racist stereotypes. These elements are real flaws, and they belong in any full account of the film.
They don’t erase what’s great about Dumbo. They sit alongside it, part of the period and the studio that made it, and viewers today have to hold both. Parents watching with children can use those scenes to talk about how films reflect the prejudices of their time. Children tend to ask about them anyway, and they deserve a clear answer.
The Strike
Disney made Dumbo during the bitter 1941 strike by its animators, who walked out over pay, credit and working conditions. The studio was divided, and the dispute left lasting scars on the company and on Walt Disney’s relationship with his staff. Several of the studio’s finest artists left in the years that followed, and the company was never quite the same family it had been in the thirties.
There’s a small, pointed joke about it in the film. When the clowns plan to go and ask the big boss for a raise, the scene is widely read as the animators’ caricature of the striking workers. This is a strange piece of studio politics hidden inside a children’s film, and it shows that the lovely, gentle world on screen was made in a very tense place.
Dumbo (2019). 4/10
4 / 10
Tim Burton directed the remake, released in March 2019, with a cast including Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito and Eva Green. Farrell plays Holt Farrier, a former circus star who returns from the First World War having lost an arm, to find his wife dead and his circus in decline. His children discover that the new baby elephant can fly.
The animals don’t talk. Timothy the mouse is gone, and so are the crows, the storks and the pink elephants, except for a brief, soap-bubble tribute. The emotional center shifts from Dumbo and his mother to the Farrier family, and the film spends most of its time on their grief, their money problems and their dreams.
The computer-generated Dumbo is beautifully realized, with enormous, expressive blue eyes, and his flying scenes are the best things in the film. Everything built around him feels thin.
The human characters are sketched, the dialogue is flat and the plot keeps adding complications instead of feeling. By the halfway mark, the elephant has become a guest in his own film.
Dreamland
The second half moves the story to Dreamland, a huge amusement park owned by a ruthless entertainment tycoon, V.A. Vandevere, played by Michael Keaton. Vandevere buys the circus to acquire Dumbo, promises to protect everyone and then betrays them all. Many critics read Dreamland as a sly jab at Disney itself, a giant corporation that buys small, magical things and turns them into attractions.
If that was the intention, it’s an odd note in a Disney film, and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Keaton plays Vandevere broadly, and DeVito, as the circus owner, has a few nice moments, but neither character is interesting enough to carry the second half. The finale, with Dreamland burning and the animals escaping, is busy and loud, and it never approaches the simple emotion of Baby Mine.
The finale loses me completely. Keaton and DeVito deserve far better than shouting over a burning amusement park while the elephant waits for the plot to remember he exists. I kept wishing somebody would just let Dumbo and his mother have the film back.
For Writers
The remake gives the story to a family of humans who talk constantly about their feelings, and Dumbo becomes a special effect. The original kept him silent and central.
When you retell a story, adding characters to explain its emotions can smother them. The original’s power often lies in what it left unsaid.
Before expanding a simple story, ask what the added characters give that the original lacked. If the answer is only explanation, leave them out.
What the Remake Lost
The remake’s ending sends Dumbo and his mother back to live free in the wild, and the circus gives up animal acts altogether. It’s a modern, well-meaning ending, and it’s the most interesting idea in the film. It came too late to save a story that had long since lost its focus.
The deeper problem is that the remake doesn’t trust its central character.
The original put a silent baby elephant at the center and made the audience feel everything he felt. The remake surrounds him with humans who talk constantly and explain their feelings, and Dumbo becomes a special effect in their story. It earned over three hundred and fifty million dollars worldwide, and it was still widely regarded as a disappointment.
Why the Original Lasts
What makes the 1941 film last is that it’s about something every child fears and every parent understands: being separated from the person who loves you most. It says that in sixty-four minutes, with a baby elephant, a mouse, a lullaby and a feather, and it never pads, explains or apologizes.
It’s a 10. The remake is a 4. Watch the original, ideally with a child, and be ready to discuss the crows and the roustabouts. The remake is worth seeing only for the flying, and even then the original does it better, with a few drawn lines and a feather.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Dumbo, the 1941 version, builds its whole story on one wound, a baby separated from his mother, and every scene either deepens that wound or moves toward healing it.
A story with a single, clear emotional core stays focused however many characters and events surround it. Losing that core is how remakes lose their way.
Name the one emotional wound at the center of your story, then check every scene against it. If a scene neither deepens the wound nor moves toward healing it, cut it.
The Verdict on Dumbo
I give the 1941 Dumbo a 10 because sixty-four minutes with a baby elephant, a mouse and a lullaby hit harder than anything Burton built with his enormous budget. The 2019 remake is a 4, and the flying scenes are the only reason it climbs that high, because everything else treats the elephant as a prop in somebody else’s story. Watch the original, and keep a tissue close for Baby Mine.
