Geek with Family

We just watched Disney’s Dumbo because Toddler_o_Geek is sick and that’s all she wanted to do (after whining "no" to the shopping mall, snacks, and changing diaper). I must have had the Disney Story Soundtrack vinyl LP when I was a kid because I sure did remember all those songs about trains ("Casey Junior"), clowns, building circus tents ("Song of the Roustabouts") and black crows flying ("When I See an Elephant Fly").

Dumbo is probably one of the few cartoons from Disney’s catalog with a scene featuring the main characters so drunk that they hallucinate "Pink Elephants on Parade," which my wife doesn’t associate with alcoholism, guess she didn’t watch enough cartoons as a kid. Toddler_o_Geek totally cracked up over Dumbo’s agent, Timothy Q. Mouse, drunkily popping and floating between champagne bubbles Dumbo blew with his trunk (wonderful toddler laughter very welcome as she is quite miserable with her cold).

We all watched it in the big theater room. The restored film looked good, the backgrounds revealing every brush stroke in the matte paintings. Distractingly, color primaries were super hot, sometimes glowing compared to the rest of the palette. I did notice some edge enhancement when the mouse was acting as the Ringmaster’s subconscious. The soundtrack gave me that dead inside feeling like all music recorded in the first half of the 20th century.

Dumbo really impressed me with its attention to animation choreography. Stand out scenes include putting up the circus tent with its synchronized sledge hammers and Dumbo’s aerial attack on his mean circus co-workers. Disney really was special once, too bad Dumbo will never enter the Public Domain so anyone could expand on its magic.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 11:40 pm and is filed under DVD, Family. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.