Ben Sharpsteen
Dumbo - L'elefante volante

There are films whose production process is almost more interesting than the final result, such as "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), which deserves to be recounted in detail due to the remarkable production stories it encountered. The same goes for "Dumbo" (1941), which is one of Disney's 4/5 masterpieces of all time, not coincidentally well placed in the so-called Golden Age of the famous animation house.

"In the spring of 1941, under pressure from the Bank of America and shareholders, Walt Disney Productions agreed to reduce its production costs to about $15,000 per week. In Walt Disney's words, this meant containing expenses for new films to around $700,000, a third of those for Pinocchio and Fantasia. Since production costs accounted for up to 85-90% of Disney's total expenses, tightening the belt further meant having to lay off over half of the staff" (Michael Barrier, "Walt Disney – Dreamer and Genius")

And so Disney faced the first strike in its history, a strike led by animators and employees on the proposal of Art Babbitt, a big name at Disney. He was fired immediately, despite Walt's loyalists, who avoided the strike, including Gunther Lessing, issuing what they considered a definitive sentence: "Being hired at Disney was more or less like having a guaranteed pension [...] since it was almost impossible for Walt to fire anyone with even a minimum potential of talent." It was clearly not so.

The strike disrupted the production of "Dumbo," which was intended by Walt to be a low (indeed, very low) cost film, given that aside from the sensational success of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), the next two films, "Pinocchio" and, especially, "Fantasia," were colossal flops (the first cost $2,289,247 and grossed $2 million; the second cost $85,000 and brought in half) due to their release during the disastrous timing of 1940, amidst the outbreak of World War II in Europe, a continent where these films could not be released, thus lacking a fundamental market segment, not to mention that the same fate befell distribution in Japan.

Thus, costs had to be contained, and "Dumbo" is just that, a small 68-minute film, barely considered a feature film, with minimal backgrounds, often (well) recycled animations, a somewhat less detailed drawing style, and it will not happen often in the future to see a story taking place in modern times, no more old castles and princes as saviors, but a film that was entirely set in 1941. Given the working conditions, the result still appears miraculous today. As Walt himself said, "[...] Dumbo is the most spontaneous thing we've ever done."

"[...] The Disney studio acquired the name and basic story, most likely when the book was still in manuscript form. It was one of the dozens of ideas bought exclusively by the studio between 1938 and 1939, after the success of Snow White had made both money and incentive to acquire exploitable stories available" (Michael Barrier)

The idea, at least initially, would be that of a short film since the booklet from which the work was derived is minimal and contains many pictures and very few words. It was a roll-a-book, an invention of the time, essentially a small box in which a kind of illustrated scroll was placed, telling a story in images. A children's plaything that had modest fortune, of which Dumbo is the most famous example.

Disney gave, in creating the plot and characters, ample space to its animators (or at least those who hadn't gone on strike) and especially gave free rein to Ben Sharpsteen, an important name in Disney animation of the 1940s and '50s.

The result was the creation of an immortal film, a masterpiece destined to influence countless generations (including Tim Burton, who would make a debatable remake of it). The lightness and the mix of laughter and tears (it's perhaps one of Disney's most shocking films when viewed as a child) is, from every point of view, unbeatable. The story of the little elephant shunned by everyone because of his enormous ears, the abandonment by his mother, and the friendship with the mouse Timothy are figures and moments that have rightfully entered the history of cinema. Visually, it contains some sequences of exceptional reach: mention the circus construction with elephants engaged in setting up the tent, and the famous pink elephants sequence anticipates, by at least 25 years, the beat generation and the post-'68 counterculture, with some implications that perhaps escaped many. In fact, seeing pink elephants, in the USA, means being drunk, and a good book titled "Walt Disney, The Dark Side Of The Dumbo" obsessively recounts all the controversial aspects of it. An artwork that, a few years ago, was condemned as racist, due to the black crows singing "I've seen the things that I can tell, never have I seen elephants fly" which were seen as a crude and outdated stereotype also partly because the head of the bird band is named Jim Crow, a racist term for referring to black people. Of course, everything must be placed in its right time; it was 1941!

The film did very well and grossed a lot, the reviews were unanimous. The Time review of December 29, 1941, however, displeased Walt a lot, who, reading it, saw that the innovations made by animators like Huemer, Grant, and Bill Tytla were appreciated. No mention of Walt, who, annoyed, according to Huemer's memories, said, "Damn, it looks like I didn't do anything in this film."

Walt, it's fair to say, worked very little in the final realization (sketches, animations), and it was not his idea to observe some elephants live to meticulously reproduce their movements (which later became common practice in Disney studios, especially in more recent times), but he had the original idea to purchase the rights to the roll-a-book and conducted, like a conductor, the entire animation department.

"Measuring Disney's contribution to Dumbo is more difficult than usual because there is less documentation on the film's production than usual. Although Walt’s desk agenda indicates that he participated in dozens of meetings about Dumbo in 1940, none of the meetings were transcribed. In the increasingly harsh financial climate [...] the service of a stenographer was a sacrificial luxury. In Dumbo there are, however, numerous clues that show that even other hands played a more substantial role than usual in shaping the film. Ben Sharpsteen directed Dumbo, and in its economy and clarity, Dumbo recalls the best of the short cartoons [...] that Sharpsteen had directed for Disney before directing part of Snow White and supervising Pinocchio" (Michael Barrier)

Finally, a note. The relationships between Disney and European dictators Hitler and Mussolini were well-known, there are many books about it, and it is known that Il Duce loved "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," Disney-branded comic strips, and that in 1940, during the ongoing but not yet deteriorated war, at least in Italy, at Villa Torlonia where he stayed and where he received Walt Disney in person at least a couple of times, he had "Fantasia" screened. Walt was, firmly, a businessman; his sole purpose was for his films to be distributed in as many places as possible, and if this meant doing business with dictators of every political extraction, he, rightly or wrongly, was accustomed to dirtying his hands. Yet, in full 1941, with Nazism still firmly in place and the defeat near but not yet in progress, with the concentration camps, the Holocaust, and the hunt for diversity, "Dumbo" appeared as an inclusive film, in which a poor elephant with an evident physical malformation, marginalized and mocked, found, thanks to some friends and above all his inner strength, the will to react and redeem himself (certainly, there's the magic feather, which arrives at the end, but it's a very justified narrative device) and thus as far as possible from Nazism (above all) and fascism. Because, as I said above, everything must be weighed and contextualized. Even if it's just a simple (simple?) cartoon.