I was in a weird, ephemeral mood, feeling disconnected and out of sorts, trolling through YouTube looking for clips to post because I just didn't feel like writing.
Then I came across this.
Let me say, Dumbo is at or near the top of my list of favorite movies. This scene has always made me cry uncontrollably, but I hadn't seen it--had made a choice to avoid it--since my Mom passed away. Bill Tytla's animation, depicting Dumbo's pure love for his mother and his sad, lingering glance backwards as he leaves, is absolute perfection; the song, by Ned Washington and Frank Churchill, was always one of Mom's favorites.
I literally had to take a break from writing for a few minutes to finish crying after posting that. And I'd already watched the clip earlier, with the same results.
Despite the well of sadness at its core, Dumbo is an often joyous movie. It was made quickly, in an attempt to make up the enormous financial losses Disney was suffering due to the financial disasters Pinocchio and Fantasia proved to be in their initial releases. Walt's personal involvement with Dumbo may have been a bit less than with his previous films, which allowed his creative team to run wild, particularly with this, one of the trippiest damn things you'll ever see:
YouTube's notoriously weak compression levels don't really let you fully appreciate the awesome achievments of Disney's effects animators and ink & paint department, but what still comes through is the endless level of invention in this sequence. It just keeps going, and just when you think it can't go further, it does--this is a Freudian essay come to life.
Another favorite song from Dumbo is mildly controversial. Yes, the notion of depicting crows with stereotypically "black" voices and mannerisms is, shall we say, unenlightened, but, at least not here, racist. The crows here aren't servile or shuffling, they're hipster outsiders, playing by their own rules. And Ward Kimball's astonishingly loose animation gives them some pretty amazing moves--check out the number of poses Robert Crumb would later swipe:
Oh, one other thing. Enjoy this while you can. Since Disney is notorious when it comes to potecting their material, these clips could get pulled down at any time. But hey, aren't all pleasures fleeting?
