One Paragraph Movie Review: Dumbo

One hundred and twenty-second film: Dumbo, the original 1941 Disney version. At best, this is a sickly-sweet, predictable-but-pleasant very young children’s story about an outcast elephant with unusual features, with animation that looks like a hobby and the unexpected image of a mouse shouting “CLIMAX!” in a sleeping ringmaster’s ear. At worst it’s simplistic, with a genuinely terrifying drunken hallucination sequence and a depiction of crows as jive-talkin’ African Americans so racist that the leader of the murder is actually called Jim Crow. It’s mercifully short though, and admittedly the pink hallucinated elephants and any of the scenes populated by shadows through a tent are well executed, but ultimately this manages what seems impossible — a boring movie about a flying elephant. Mind you, it’s a good thing Disney delivered the baby elephant via a stork rather than the more biologically accurate technique. The animators– and my delicate sensitivities — would not have been up to it. Meh. One and a half saggy-bottomed pachyderm pyramids out of five.