Thursday, May 20, 2010

Dumbo Festival on the Web

There's a lot of web action about Disney's Dumbo. Hans Perk has been posting script drafts and Mark Mayerson has been posting mosaics of frame-grabs (one, two, and three) -- h/t Michael Sporn. Michael Sporn has a post of frame-grabs from the tent-raising, story boards for the same sequence (in pastels), and a re-cap of the first. I couple of years ago I published an essay about Dumbo at Mike Barrier's site. The essay focused on social relations in the film and, in particular, on the relationship between Dumbo and those crows, obviously modeled on black Americans (which puts that post in the same arena as my series of race symbolism, in particular the posts on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Huck Finn). Here's my concluding paragraph:
The emphasis is certainly on Dumbo as an individual. But, by establishing a contemporary setting, an egalitarian sentiment, middle-brow snobbery, and those African-American crows, Disney embraces a wider social context. This leaves me with the odd feeling that, in some ways Dumbo is a more ambitious film than, say, Pinocchio. The Pinocchio story seems strongly self-contained within the relationships between the three central characters; it’s an entirely personal story. Dumbo, though intensely focused on a very important relationship—that between mother and child—embeds that relationship in the larger world in a fairly open-ended way. Disney was reaching for more than he had in Pinocchio. Is it too much to see in Dumbo the first step down a path that Disney chose not to explore?
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EDIT: Michael Sporn has just published a variety of materials related to the "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence, one of the most staggeringly awesome pieces of animation ever done. One of these days I'll work up a post on it.

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