Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade- More a comedy than an epic, but at least Spielberg finally gets comedy right on a big scale after 1941 failed. Connery and Ford make a great double act, and Spielberg finally starts to mature his daddy issues a bit. Which is weird considering how hilariously inane everything else here is. 3.5/5

OH Boo! Actually, I've been making my way through the classics for the past couple of months... Beauty and the Beast has far more charm than Cinderella, that's for sure. LOL Gaston's a prick! Yeah wtf, it's hardly sexist. Even when Disney is being 'sexist' it's only really reflecting the social attitudes of the time in their adaptation, and depending on the audience, adds either a lot of humour or none at all (Snow White being released in 1937, well, obviously they'd refrain from injecting her character with much sass as opposed to say Meg or Princess Jasmine) so meh. They're just being accurate really.

lol why does this reply sound so serious, idk

This is probably the most simply animated of all Disney's features, and at a perfect 63 minutes it's also the shortest. But what this little film lacked in budget it more than made up for with its virtuosity, pathos and creativity. This appears to be a very simple film, and in many ways it is (and that's a good thing), but I think many have confused this surface simplicity for altogether simple-mindedness of vision and lack of anything to say, which couldn't be further from the truth. Pinocchio and many other more beloved Disney classics may have slightly more formally complex and tightly propulsive narratives, but none of them have either as much mature characterization or as much probing insight into their themes as Dumbo, which also has the mark of being one of the few classic Disney films with a real and rigorous social conscience, an attribute that has unfortunately fallen prey to the (perhaps defensibly) fashionable tendency to accuse early Disney films of racism. All these charges are, in this particular case, completely invalid as, on the contrary, Dumbo deals with race issues far more maturely and truthfully than any number of still popular white-guilt Hollywoodizations like To Kill a Mockingbird or Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, even if it's possible that it did not set out to do so. I think the viewer who sets aside their preconceived notions of what a classic Disney film is supposed to do (charmingly entertain and maintain the status quo) and simply watches it as they would any other film will find that it, as an independent artistic object, has more in common with the warm social courage of Chaplin's classic era and the philosophical simplicity of The Red Balloon than it does with the privileged myopia of most other Disney films. Unfortunately I haven't really been able to find any critical evaluations that both place it in the latter tradition or successful debunk the accusations against it, so I'll have to do that myself. In my attempt to explain why I draw on lots of specific examples, so if you intend to watch this movie soon you may find some spoilers, though I think most of us have the basic idea of the story metabolized into our cultural knowledge anyway.

The film takes place inside of a restless and nightmarishly hierarchical circus, full of clubishness, superficial gossip, and traditionalist "dignity". Into this world a meek show-elephant named Jumbo is delivered her son, who she receives characteristically late and christens "Jumbo Jr." It is not long, however, before the freakishly large ears "only a mother could love" land him outsider status among the elephants as well as the nickname "Dumbo". Ostracized, Dumbo endures the taunts both of fellow animals and the circus's customers. A scene I found particularly moving was when Dumbo seemed to be enjoying the jeers of the customers, not knowing that he was being made fun of until his mother started defending him against it (no other Disney film I know has characterization as subtly insightful as that). Jumbo throws a fit protecting her son, and is locked up as a "mad elephant". Dumbo is left to his lonesome, enduring the taunts and exclusion of the remaining elite elephants. At this point a small circus mouse named Timothy befriends Dumbo under the promise of returning him to his mother; he compliments his ears as unique and scares the pretentious elephants up the tent walls and out of Dumbo's way. Timothy's plan is to sneak into the ringmaster's room at night and, by whispering into his sleeping ear, incept ideas of how to creatively turn Dumbo into a star within the surface, effectively climbing him up the social ladder over the pretentious elephants and his mother out of solitary confinement. The next day an elaborate trick which involves all of the elephants and stars Dumbo is planned. It doesn't seem to be going very well in the first place, but soon Dumbo appears on the scene, his ears tied shamefully behind his head, and things go from worse to worst as they rip open and trip him into ruining the whole show, embarrassing not only him but all of the other elephants who ostracize him even further because of the incident, and further still when their "dignified" leader learns that Dumbo has been lumped in with the clowns, the dregs of the show. After some visually stimulating but, for Dumbo, humiliating gags in the show, the clowns celebrate their success by getting piss drunk. When a loose bottle is accidentally dropped into Dumbo's water supply, the film suddenly takes a sharp stylistic turn. As Dumbo and Timothy satisfy their thirst they become more and more giggly, as well as more creative. Dumbo begins blowing square and staircase-shaped bubbles, which soon turn into mysterious Pink Elephants.

The Pink Elephant sequence is the most famous in the film, and yet its brilliance has somehow had its elbow twisted into being seen as a structural weakness. Pothead nostalgics speak of how cool and trippy it is, and film critics genuinely judge it to be just as great an animated achievement as that of any in Disney's filmography including Fantasia, if not the studio's single crowning achievement. This compliment, however, is almost invariably followed by the complaint that the psychedelic freak show does not "fit" the otherwise picaresque style of the film. Dear Film Critics: if you wanted to know why you are often considered to be playing second fiddle to the critics of literature and the fine arts, this kind of inane and brain-dead complaint is why. If you can't handle a single free-form digression in Dumbo, god help you when you have to make heads or tails of Hamlet's play-within-a-play, or especially the ever-shifting cauldron of style that is Ulysses. "The style must remain consistent throughout" rule went out at the beginning of the century. Get with the times. More important than just being theoretically hip though is the fact that if you've been paying any attention at all to the film's themes, this sequence is integral to the texture and message of the film at just about every level. From the very beginning, the film opposes itself in sentiment to the classically structured and traditional which it views as stuffy and pretentious. The Pink Elephant scene, which comes out of the bawdy bottom-crawlers of the clowns, shows Dumbo and Timothy's break from traditionalist ways of seeing. Their minds are opened by the Pink Elephants to endless creative possibilities--they can shift their shape in whichever direction they like, produce beautiful music and spectacle. Previously Timothy's plan for Dumbo's victory relied on working within the ringmaster's structure. The Pink Elephants have broken down those narrow, traditionalist walls and alerted him to the infinitude of conceptual possibilities.

The physical world, however, is not as free as the mind, and we must come down sometime and learn how to turn those abstract visions into pragmatic realities. Timothy and Dumbo wake up hungover in the middle of a tree and find themselves being taunted by a gang of black crows. And this brings us to the race issue. The film is famously decried as racist for the crows' characterization through supposed African American stereotypes. Before I get to that though, let's back up and look for any hints of a racial theme in the film up to this point. First of all and to get the obvious out of the way: Dumbo resembles an African elephant, while the others resemble Indian elephants. Secondly, earlier in the film as the circus train is chugging along, the frame strangely meanders away from the train to focus on a bunch of human workers alongside the tracks, singing a work song of servitude. They are all black. If anything, the film seems to be identifying with their social position, likening their essential slavery to that of the animals within the oppressive circus system. Fast forward to now, where we are suddenly confronted with undeniably African American crows. There are a few arguments as to why this is a negative portrayal. The first is that the crows speak in an African American dialect. Do I really need to rebut that one? If you think showing characters speaking in a certain dialect is proof positive of that portrayal being negative, it shows that you are a racist critic, not that it is a racist film. The second idea is that since the crows behave in a crude and rambunctious way they are therefore represented condescendingly. But looking at the film in context, it's clear that within this world, it is not the anarchic sensibilities of the birds that are derided, but those of the traditional, prim and proper elephant elite, which excludes and pushes out creativity with its stuffiness. When Timothy suspects that Dumbo has flown to the top of the tree, we see that it is only through the primal and intuitive nature of the rude and rambunctious clowns that Dumbo was ever able to fly in the first place. So the precedent of restlessness and dissent as a key to success has been established, meaning the crows are not seen negatively by behaving so. Now, it is true that the crows initially doubt that Dumbo could fly and do some teasing (though it's also pretty clear they are teasing Timothy and not Dumbo or his affliction). But the crows should not be blamed for doubting Dumbo could fly the way they can--they see elephants as prim and proper and bound to needless social rules; of course they don't expect him to fly. But when Timothy lays out Dumbo's history of ostracization they immediately identify with and sympathize with him, see him as one of their marginalized own, and fix to help him. Of course, Dumbo has blacked out since last night, and he has no memory of himself flying, and doesn't believe in himself enough to try it. The crows conspire with Timothy and come up with a typically ingenious trickster solution: to tell Dumbo that one of their ordinary black feathers is in fact a magic feather that allows him to fly. Long story short, Dumbo flies, using the same big ears that pushed him to the margins of society in the first place. But of course, he doesn't know that yet, he just thinks he can fly because of the magic feather.

Dumbo returns to the circus and is placed into a familiarly humiliating clown routine. He's on top of a phony-burning building that phony-fireman clowns circle at the bottom with a trampoline Dumbo is meant to bounce on, but he plans to break free of the same old routine and to fly away, upstaging everyone. He jumps, but in mid-flight the "magic feather" slips away, and Dumbo begins to plummet. On the fast descent into the hard ground Timothy has to convince Dumbo that he could fly by himself all along and the feather was only a way to trick him into confirming Timothy's suspicions. At the last moment, Dumbo veers upwards past the clowns, the ringmaster and the audience, transcending the narrow structure of the circus and basically making the impossible possible. He becomes the star attraction of a now bright and creative circus, and is reunited with his mother. But Dumbo could not have done any of it without the trusting friendship of Timothy mouse, the creative anarchic imaginativeness of the maligned clowns, or the trickster ingenuity of the marginalized but flying crows; it's the rare feel-good picture which manages to be socially apt as well as personally empowering. Add to this the fact of insightful and often hilarious characterization as well as simple but tastefully crafted animation and you have yourself nothing less than a masterpiece that can be enjoyed on multiple levels, all of them fulfilling.