3/7/2024 0 Comments Disney dumbo 1994 wristwatch![]() As Gabler details in his book, Disney’s response to the praise of noted New Yorker critic Alexander Woollcott, who had been less-than-enamored with much of Disney’s previous work, was to declare “Dumbo” as “one of those little things that we knocked out between epics.” When speaking of the film’s success, Disney himself was modest, but also bluntly honest. And that says nothing of the picture’s well-documented racial insensitivities. Dumbo, for one, discovers he’s special only by getting black-out drunk. Of course, the so-called faultless film has many peculiarities for modern audiences. Often, humans are seen simply as shadows in a tent, which while deviating from the precision of earlier Disney movies, heightens “Dumbo’s” themes of isolation and careless bullying. It can - and has - been argued that its financial limitations led to some inventive animation, namely in the trippy pink-elephant sequence, which inspired a whole breadth of ’60s-era psychedelics. RELATED: Tim Burton’s ‘Dumbo’ isn’t your grandfather’s Disney classic » That other 10 minutes is liable to cost another half million dollars.” And when it reached that point I said, ‘That’s as far as I can stretch it.’ They said, ‘Can you add another 10 minutes to it, Walt?’ and I said, ‘No. “First, I was going to make it as a 30-minute subject,” Disney said in 1956 in a quote unearthed in Taschen’s expansive “The Walt Disney Film Archives: The Animated Movies 1921-1968.” “But as I got developing and we got new things in there … I kept expanding and before I knew it, I had a 62-minute picture that cost $700,000. ![]() While instantly hailed as a masterpiece, “Dumbo” exists in part because it was, well, cheap. Its initial run brought in half a million in profit, which, if not erasing Disney’s debts, eased investor concerns. And while varying figures are floated for the film’s six-figure budget, it was finished in a year and a half - compared to, say, the five or so for a Walt passion project such as “Bambi.” ![]() Added bonus: Its exaggerated animals and one-note plot required no special effects.ĭisney relaxed his pressure on his animators to advance the medium, allowing, essentially, as noted in Neal Gabler’s biography “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination,” photostats of sketches rather than full layouts. But its simple, relatively linear story with few human characters meant, for Disney, that it was the right story at the right time. Both failed to bring in a profit in their initial runs, prompting the studio to look for quick turnarounds, the first of which was the slight - some may say tacky - Disney advertisement that was “The Reluctant Dragon.”īased on a then-unpublished children’s book by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, which Disney acquired the rights to in the late 1930s, “Dumbo” was initially conceived as a short. “Cold” is a word that appears in many descriptions of “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia,” films that are probably more adored today and are perceived as concluding Disney’s first major golden age.įinancially, budgets for “Pinocchio” and Fantasia” had swelled to well above $2 million, driven not just by Walt Disney’s desire for perfection but in his belief that animation is the ideal medium for telling mature stories. Culturally, Disney’s current films were perceived by the critical elite as lacking the warmth and whimsy of its “Silly Symphony” and Mickey Mouse shorts. If Disney were to survive - at least as Walt had envisioned it - it needed a hit, one that would be relatively cheap and quick to produce. And “Pinocchio,” as Walt Disney would defensively point out, had the bad timing of being released during mania for “Gone With the Wind.” World War II caused the studio to lose what was once estimated in this newspaper as nearly 40% of its market, and prior to “Dumbo’s” release, the company had sunk a heavy investment into its necessary-but-fancy new Burbank home. There were, it must be noted, factors out of Disney’s control contributing to the studio’s struggles. ![]() Those writing about film weren’t dismissive of “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia,” but the underlying current of many a review was that both movies lacked a certain soul or heart that was present in 1938’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Audiences too didn’t immediately warm to either, which placed a sudden financial burden on the burgeoning studio - one that just a few years earlier had hushed all naysayers with the exquisite, unexpected blockbuster that was “Snow White.”
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