What Walt Taught Me: Dumbo

What Walt Taught Me: Dumbo August 2, 2015

DumboLike Cars was to Pixar, Dumbo was to the boyish genius Walt Disney: a sign that at his worst he was  capable of producing mere  excellence. Dumbo is an extended short and not quite a fairy tale and it is also the first film in the series that did not change everything or break new ground for the audience. The movie lost the cover of Time Magazine, back when that was the place for what mattered to the Establishment, to an event called Pearl Harbor.

It was the worst of times.

The film could have served as a warning that genius could not be rolled regularly off an assembly line, but the studio would create Bambi in the next go-round and Dumbo gained by the comparison. Dumbo also made money, something the studio needed after Pinocchio and Fantasia. The studio proved with this bit of fluff  that some corners could be cut, a profit made in a world where international distribution was limited by a world war, and yet a very good film could still be made.

Following Snow White, Walt had been given several honorary degrees including honors at Yale and Harvard. He was viewed favorably by many academics as an innovator, artist, and representative of the best of America. Bowing to financial reality in making Dumbo was good business, and the result was still very good, but I suspect it began a long process of deflating the Disney brand in academically elite circles. The man and his company lived long enough to go from being fêted to being viewed as culturally fetid. The change in attitude said as much about a decline in cultural conservatism in the universities after the War as it does about changes in Walt’s art. Being popular with farmers in Iowa, commercially successful, and innocent stopped being good things amongst American elites.  Walt faced strikers while the film was being made that forever fractured his dream of a “band of brothers” making great art together. The strike further dented his public image with the intelligentsia. Dumbo was not a film calculated to bring the eggheads back for more Disney.

Parts of academia reward certain kinds of failure and punish many types of  success. Particularly odious are those creators who do not learn their art from educators or bow to the authority of the educational establishment. These academics particularly resent the common and the commercial. The only redeeming value of the commercial is to wash the sordid money by giving it to the academics. They can then use it to live risk-free comfortable lives while mocking the values of the donor. Disney lived through both adulation, then envy, then disdain.

Dumbo is wholesome, unpretentious, and inexpensive: the opposite of academic art of the mid to late twentieth century.

What did I learn from Dumbo?

You can always count on your mother. If you don’t know this at the bottom of our soul, then life has been very cruel to you. Nobody is sure what happened to Jumbo Senior but Mrs. Jumbo is always there for her baby. I watched Dumbo the year we moved from our home state of West Virginia to the uncivilized realm of Upstate New York. Dad went to work (and he did not disappear like Jumbo!) but was Mom who made the big change palatable. Mom was there every day with us that summer turning discomfort into a game and making the move as good as it could be.

Thank you Mom.

Dumbo was named Jumbo but nobody who loves him calls him Jumbo Jr. Why? Dumbo took a name that was an insult, a discussion of inadequacy, and made it a compliment. This is a lesson history reinforces and my experience has shown is true. My first week of school in the uncouth New York, I was teased for my accent. People called me “Reb” and other such names. The Civil War nerd and all my Union veteran ancestors rose up in me and I spoke of the virtues of Appalachia and our commitment to Lincoln. This was remarkably silly sounding from a fourth grader and so I was tagged: “Yankee” and Yankee I remained for three years until I switched schools.

What was meant as mockery soon became a compliment because I refused the insult. I liked being associated with Mr. Lincoln, like reading books on the Civil War, liked being a nerd . . . and a nerd I have remained. Even that word no longer stings as we have had our revenge and started to rule the world as nerds. After all, if  the poets and musicians on the King’s side of the Civil War could make “cavalier, “a word used by their enemies as a slur into  a compliment, so could I!

Timothy the Mouse was an unexpected friend . . . elephants do not like mice in cartoon convention. (Another such convention is not to look down while walking over a canyon. Sadly, cartoon conventions are of limited usefulness.) Timothy likes Dumbo even if he should not and there is a message there: conventional wisdom about where to find friends isn’t always wise.

Dumbo has an uncomfortable scene with crows who are voiced by African-American singers and this has led to a charge by some that the film is racist. Yet the crows are likeable, witty, free, and strong. They believe in Dumbo when almost nobody else will and their spice keeps the film from becoming maudlin. Surely in a country where Jim Crow laws still segregated the nation, such independent birds becoming friends with Dumbo undercut racism more than it contributed to it. Add the lesson of Timothy the Mouse and one finds no support for being friends only with those like yourself.

Dumbo can fly because nature has given him a great gift: his adorable ears. They are also the very thing that other animals mock and so he is sensitive about them. As a nerd with thick glasses, I understood this mockery. Dumbo was hopeful that what was different about me, even a bit broken, could become an asset. Growing up in a house with a legally blind person who refused to limit himself was the deepest reason to believe this truth but Dumbo reinforced the lesson. I could not hit or catch well and so I spent time reading and imagining . . . all of which turned out pretty well for me.

God can turn into brokenness into a strength if we let Him and any transform any tendency to vice into an opportunity to virtue. So Dante teaches but before I could read Dante there was Dumbo saying the same thing in color on the big screen.

Timothy the Mouse saw Dumbo could fly but Dumbo could not believe that what he took as a curse might be a blessing. Timothy convinced him that a “magic feather” would help him out if only he would hold it, then he could fly. Eventually Dumbo let go of the feather and reached his full potential. . . . a kind of cartoon adulthood. This reminds me of the (fairly useless) training wheels Daddy put on by first bike. They did not help me much but gave me the confidence I needed to learn to ride. Soon Daddy took them off and I could ride!

Imagination is not everything: we are limited by nature and morality but imagination defeats the false limits of unnatural human convention and unnatural desires. We can imagine so many things and  enjoy those wholesome possibilities (best to see pink elephants in your imagination and not after drink). The crows were right, you might not ever see butter fly but I have seen an elephant fly thanks to Mr Disney and somehow that helped.

 


Browse Our Archives