Many Disney films from the 1930s through the 1950s foreground nonhuman nature and either espouse animal rights, sometimes at the expense of human nature, or assert a unified animal-environmental ethic that illustrates how the environmental movement can serve human and nonhuman nature most effectively. Dumbo, for example, foregrounds animal rights rather than environmentalism. According to David Whitley, the film is one of only two from the Walt Disney period that “manage[s] to resist the allure of wild nature” (7). In a circus setting that intertwines human with nonhuman animals, Dumbohighlights an animal rights-driven narrative that follows an ideological pattern similar to that of Bambi. Animals and humans live separate lives and, whenever humans connect with animals, animals suffer. The intensity of the violence associated with humans differs in the two films, however, and the burlesque representation of humans in Dumbo further validates the animal world, suggesting that animals are more human than their human exploiters.
Dumbo also adds conflicts within species as a source of suffering but, once differences between animals are either erased or compensated for, that conflict is resolved. Humans, on the other hand, exploit, ridicule, and mistreat animals in the circus throughout the film. And, even though the film ends happily, Dumbo’s success is featured without any reference to humans. Only human cultural artifacts illustrate their presence. Articles in human newspapers announce Dumbo’s exploits, and the circus train’s best and most modern car transports Timothy Q. Mouse, Dumbo, and his mother; yet, any active human involvement in Dumbo’s popularity once he can fly is completely erased. In Dumbo, animal rights take center stage, with animals gaining equal or even superior status in a narrative in which animal abuse is critiqued and resolved by animal behavior. As Bosley Crowther of the New York Times asserts, “The ringmaster and the clowns are the only suggestions of real people in the picture, and they are highly burlesqued. From first to last it is an animal story, and the animals are the miraculous Disney types” (“Walt Disney’s Cartoon, ‘Dumbo’…” 27).
Dumboconstructs its circus setting as a world controlled by animals from the opening credits forward, but humans take on an exploitative role when the circus opens after a parade. White men sell tickets, and white boys with buckteeth tease Dumbo. A redheaded boy flutters his coat like Dumbo’s ears, and Dumbo flutters his ears because he does not know he is being mocked. Dumbo’s mother reacts to this ridicule and protects her son when a boy grabs him, so she is locked in a caged wagon that reads, “Danger, Mad Elephant.” Humans again are constructed as the source of suffering for animals in this setting as they take Mrs. Jumbo to a locked cell, but the other elephants, too, react negatively, gossiping about her and ostracizing Dumbo.
But the elephants do not represent the entire animal world. Timothy, a uniformed mouse with powerful human qualities, disdains their gossip and sticks up for Dumbo. The elephants say, “It’s all the fault of that little f.r.e.a.k.,” and pretend they do not see Dumbo when he walks in. Timothy scares them away and tells Dumbo, they are “giving him the cold shoulder.” Timothy comforts Dumbo, suggesting he might get his mother “out of the clink.” Timothy and Dumbo form a friendship that illustrates animals’ similarity to idealized humanity and, in the context of the film, their superiority to the boys who ridiculed Dumbo, the circus ringmaster and his men who cage Dumbo’s mother, and even the other elephants who give Dumbo the cold shoulder. Ultimately, Timothy proposes a plan that eventually makes Dumbo the star of the circus. Dumbo’s first attempts to raise a flag fail, so he is demoted to “clown,” but Dumbo’s eventual show-stopping triumph helps him overcome the torture he faces from the humans who seem to control his well-being.
Dumbo’s failure leads the ringmaster and his men to further exploit and mistreat Dumbo. Dumbo is disgraced, and the setting illustrates his embarrassment. The train plows through a rainstorm when the circus leaves. The other elephants suffer injuries and complain about Dumbo. One tells the others, “They’ve gone and made him a clown.” This is the last straw for the elephants: “The shame of it,” they say. “From now on he is no longer an elephant.” As a clown, Dumbo is further humiliated. He is dressed as a baby in a fire-filled window of a burning house, jumps onto a trampoline, and falls through to a bucket of bubbles. The clowns cheer this exploitation, but later Timothy tries to cheer him up as he scrubs him with a toothbrush. Dumbo realizes he has been humiliated but gains strength from Timothy and his mother, reactions that again highlight his similarity to an idealized view of humanity. Dumbo cries until Timothy takes him to her prison wagon where Mrs. Jumbo is chained and, when she sees Dumbo’s trunk, she strokes and then hugs him with her trunk, turning it into a swing for him. In a montage sequence, other mothers hug their babies, highlighting, again, their similarity to humans before Dumbo and Timothy must leave, returning to find the clowns discussing Dumbo’s success and promoting an even higher fall.
Dumbo’s successful flight provides the Disney-like ending of the film, but it also facilitates his further connection with the human world, in this case, a world of media. After some practice on a cliff, Dumbo does fly, casting his shadow on a grassland below them. Now with a magic feather from Timothy, he is ready to fly in the show with the clowns. At the moment when he must dive out of a very tall “burning” building, Dumbo flies, even after dropping the feather, in a wild loop-de-loop and peanut shooting show. Newspaper headlines declare his success, and the film ends with mother in a “star’s” private train car, and Dumbo flying in to hug her. The “When I See an Elephant Fly” song ends the film with a view of the train’s last car that closes like an eye.
But in these last scenes, humans play only peripheral roles. Animals, constructed as equal or superior to humans, build a safe world for themselves in a circus environment, perhaps in spite of the humans with whom they periodically interact. The conflict between animals has been resolved with Dumbo’s success, but that between humans and animals continues. The continuing conflict between West and East Coast styles parallels this conflict, with animals clearly gaining an upper hand over their comic human exploiters. Although Langer asserts that the West Coast style ultimately dominated the film, the East Coast style’s mark on the film remains, perhaps, as in Dumbo, illustrating the irrevocable differences between the two coasts.
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