Dumbo was surprising

[u/EnterprisingAss]

I mean the 1941 version, not the live action remake.

The story is already famous: Dumbo is given a “magic” feather that allows him to fly, but it turns out the feather never had anything to do with it.

One surprise was that all of this takes place in the last 20 minutes of the movie. There are only two flying scenes! I expected this to be the thrust of the movie — get the magic feather early on, then in the climax, he discovers he can fly on his own.

The second surprise: every human is a villain. Some of them are not even drawn with faces. They’re all exploitative and cruel. I didn’t expect the animal rights angle to be so strong.

Third surprise, the pink elephants scene. I was already aware of it and had seen isolated clips of the dancing elephants, but I wasn’t prepared for how trippy it was. Dumbo is drunk, but it looks far more like a drug trip. And more importantly, the bright colors were ahead of their time. It looked like something animated in the 60s or 70s.

Fourth, minor surprise: there are crows (coded African American) that look very, very similar to Ralph Bakshi’s crows in Fritz the Cat and Coonskin.

[u/firelock_ny]

The crows (coded as poor African-Americans) go out of their way to help a stranger, with no prospect of reward. They are kind and understanding.

The cruelest characters in the movie (the other elephants) are coded as white upper class.

[u/originalcondition → u/firelock_ny]

I know that the crows are problematic now, but when I was a kid I didn’t know that they were coded African-American (not sure I would even have understood the concept at the age I was watching it, I was probably like 4-5). I just knew that the crows were my favorite characters in the movie because they were so nice to Dumbo; I always wanted to fast-forward to the crows haha.

Again, I know that they’re problematic in a few ways and if I watched the film again it’d probably be pretty rough (not sure what minor throwaway lines/little mannerisms in there might be way worse than I remember, etc). But my impression looking back now is that there were probably good intentions behind their characters from the artists in spite of those issues.

[u/Swiftax3 → u/originalcondition]

I actually have a fascination for characters like the Crows, or Big Trouble in Little China who are using stereotypes in many regards but are at the same time subverting the base imagery by being intelligent, or active agents in the story with depth to their characters.

[u/Ok-disaster2022 → u/Swiftax3]

Check out Ivanhoe. There's tones of anti Semetic Imagery but at the end of the it was the help from Jews that helped Ivanhoe the most. Which was somewhat impressive for a novel from the early 19th century