Until recently, I never realized how outdated and offensive the movie Dumbo really is. In an attempt to reunite myself with some childhood film favourites, I borrowed this DVD from the library and watched anxiously as the horrors of this film’s prejudices unraveled. Since the last time I watched this movie was when I was very little, it never before dawned on me that what this entire movie actually depicts is some sort of patriarchal haven overflowing with instances of racism, misogyny, and animal abuse.
As the opening credits began to roll, I amused myself by noting how all the film production members’ names seemed to be the ultra-typical, monosyllabic, masculine, Caucasian names that were so common in the 1940s: Ward, Fred, Bill, Don, Walt, John, Les, Jack, Al, Art, Joe, Frank, Ned, etc.
Then the film began to establish the scene as that of a travelling circus. Of course I knew before viewing the movie that it takes place in a circus, but the implications of a circus setting didn’t fully hit me until I started watching the DVD. The moment I saw the circus scenes in the beginning, my immediate thought was, “Oh, great; any movie that depicts characters who are circus animals by using the circus itself as the playful backdrop to a story about not fitting in can’t be good news.
My initial anxiety over the circus premise was confirmed almost immediately, as the beginning scenes panned over numerous types of animals being herded into their cages as everyone boarded the train for the next town on the circus’s roster. Oddly, most of the animals seemed more than happy to oblige with their humyn masters, and many of them even seemed quite content to be locked down in their sometimes overcrowded prisons. In one instance, the elephants are calmly lining up to board their own cell. Dumbo’s mother (who hasn’t yet received her infant offering from the confused Mr. Stork who had just finished delivering babies to other mothers in the circus) woefully stops and looks back one more time, wondering where her expected infant might be, when an elephant boarding the train behind her eagerly and impatiently nudges her to hurry up and get into their little prison. Even more striking and disturbing is the part where the giraffes are loading up into their section of the train. Because of their long necks, the giraffes need an open space for their heads to stick out above the roof. Instead of simply leaving an open roof for the multiple giraffes sharing the car, a special roof that is fitted with holes big enough to encircle the giraffes’ necks comes closing around each giraffe’s neck, essentially locking them each into place. One would think the giraffes should be a little startled at this extreme form of confinement, but instead they each gaze around at each other, obediently and smilingly.
At a later point in the movie, a gorilla is throwing a fit from inside his cage, bellowing at the top of his voice and yanking on the bars of his prison, when suddenly one of the bars comes loose in his hands. Instead of making an attempt at escape, the gorilla kindly replaces the bar as if to say that imprisoned primates are content to remain in this state of confinement.
When it comes time to set up the circus in town, who winds up doing all the grunt work? Not only are the circus animals themselves condemned to building their own chamber of humiliation, but there are also faceless black men working hard at this labour. And I mean that literally; the faces on these men were featureless, with no eyes, no mouths, and no noses. They possessed no individual identities, like a group of invisible men.
Throughout the course of the film, it also becomes apparent that most, if not all, of the circus animals are of the femelle sex, a trend which later points to much of the film’s misogyny. First, there is the opening scene where the storks are delivering infant animals to all varieties of animal mothers. Then there are also subsequent scenes that show all the mothers with their growing offspring. In addition, in the elephant car there are only a bunch of femelle elephants — no males at all, aside from Dumbo. This realization instantly triggered the ecofeminist part of my brain, whereby animal abuse and exploitation are intricately linked with feminism, in this case due to the disproportionate abuse and exploitation enacted upon femelle animals in particular. (Think cow-milking, egg-stealing, calf-kidnapping [veal], and forced impregnation for meat production, when applying this concept to the bigger picture.) The point here is that this travelling circus (which is inherently exploitative of animals by forcing them to live in cages when they’re not performing ridiculous tricks for the profit of their humyn conquerors) seemed to be made up mostly of femelles, meaning that this circus was doubly exploitative, not just by enslaving animals, but by enslaving animals that were exclusively or overwhelmingly femelle.
An additional aspect of the misogyny in this film is illustrated in the relationship between Dumbo’s mother (Jumbo) and the other femelle elephants in the circus: all the other elephants do nothing but gossip amongst themselves, especially at the expense of their own Jumbo. It’s bad enough that all non-elephant social circles outcast Jumbo for having such a big-eared son, but then Jumbo is additionally outcast even by her own “sister” elephants.
To further enhance the patriarchy of the film, the audience is served a male protagonist (Dumbo) whose only sympathetic friend (aside from his mother, who quickly gets shoved to the rear of the story after she is imprisoned by her humyn masters just for standing up to the circus-going bullies who tug on Dumbo’s ears) is another male, Timothy Mouse. So we have these two endearing male characters amid a wealth of both cruel and abused femelle characters. The femelle characters are little more than victims who often become victimizers themselves.
And finally, near the end of the movie, we meet the group of black crows. Hmm, they’re black, and they’re crows, so how about giving one of them a clever name like….Jim Crow! On top of that, all the crows are given a so-called black dialect just for kicks.
Shocked by the blatant racism and stereotyped behavior, I had to rewind this scene with the crows several times just to be sure I was really seeing and hearing correctly. One of them really was named Jim Crow, and they really spoke with the stereotypical African-American minstrel dialect and vocabulary. But it gets worse from there.
As the crows start out making fun of poor Dumbo, Timothy Mouse steps up to defend Dumbo with such poignant comments as the following:
“Suppose you was torn away from your mother when you was just a baby. Nobody to tuck you in at nights. No warm, soft, caressing trunk to snuzzle into. How would you like to be left out alone…in a cold, cruel, heartless world?”
What an ironic comment to make to a set of characters who apparently represent African-Americans, who must have been no more than a couple generations removed from the time when black slaves really were routinely torn away from their families: mothers separated from their children, and the children forced to grow up motherless in a truly “cold, cruel, heartless world.
But wait! There’s more!
“And why? I ask ya, why? Just because he’s got those big ears, they call him a freak.”
Substitute “big ears” with “big lips,” as it seems obvious what kind of freak the film writers are really referring to.
“And on top of that, they made him a clown!”
Interestingly, this sounds just like the times when the white power structure used to make clowns of the socially despised blacks. It was called minstrelsy. First, whites dressed up in blackface that offensively caricatured African facial features.
Then, even African-Americans were given the “opportunity” to play these blackface minstrels.
When I watched the movie Dumbo as a little girl, the scene with the pink elephants frightened me. Now that I’m older and wiser…well, this film still frightens me, only now it’s frightening on a deeper and more cerebral level than before.
It is really too bad that this movie had to stink so much. I really love the character of Dumbo, and he would have been magnificent in the right movie. He’s so cute, and I love his adorable big ears. Unfortunately, everything else about this movie felt all wrong as an adult viewing the movie with a more critical eye.
