A flock of storks descend on a traveling circus carrying bundles of joy for the animals; bears, tigers, kangaroo, hippo, giraffe. The lone exception is an elephant, Mrs. Jumbo, who tries to grab the bundles with her trunk as they parachute into other pens, then gazes upward waiting for a baby that never comes.

A living train pulls the circus out of town and winds through Florida. A stork that had gotten lost the night before catches up with the train and delivers a baby to Mrs. Jumbo. She names him Jumbo Jr., but as the female elephants fawn over him, he reveals a pair of enormous ears. Affection turns to ridicule as the others dub him “Dumbo”.

The circus strikes tent in a new town. Some customers see Dumbo and start to tease him. His mother responds by tossing them and the ringmaster through the air, then goes on a rampage when handlers try to separate her from her baby. She’s penned in a boxcar marked “Mad Elephant,” and Dumbo is left to fend for himself.

His only friend is Timothy Q. Mouse (the voice of character actor Edward Brophy), who uses osmosis to give the ringmaster the idea of building an act around Dumbo. As the other elephants stack themselves on each other, Dumbo is supposed to springboard onto the top of the pyramid. Instead, he stumbles over his ears and knocks the elephants down, destroying the big top in the process.

Now suffering the indignity of performing in the clown show, Dumbo is taken by the mouse to visit his mother, who reaches through a barred window with her trunk and sings him to sleep with “Baby Mine.” At the bottom of despair, Dumbo discovers his ears have empowered him with the gift of flight.

Directed by Ben Sharpsteen and adapted by Joe Grant & Dick Huemer and Otto Englander, Dumbo was based on a 1939 children’s book by Helen Abseron and illustrated by Harold Perl. It was so obscure, no one was sure how Walt Disney came to acquire the film rights.

Disney suffered a setback in 1940 when neither Pinocchio or Fantasia were successful at the box office. To save costs on Dumbo, his studio’s fourth animated feature, backgrounds were rendered in watercolor paint, instead of the oil paint and gouache used in every Disney film except for his first, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The running time came to 64 minutes, which prompted Disney’s distributor – RKO Pictures – to request it either be lengthened to 70 minutes, cut to short subject length, or released as a B-picture. Disney insisted it be released as an A-film, and his gamble paid off. The film was a success, and to this day, some consider Dumbo the finest animated film ever made.

The animation is fairly basic, with pastel backgrounds, and characters that are simply drawn. It’s short, and resorts to a dream sequence involving pink elephants to clock in over an hour. And though it wasn’t considered insensitive at the time, the use of Black stereotypes to portray the crows is a blot against the movie while watching it today. But the more I thought about it, the more I appreciated the film’s simplicity.

This was before the days of the marketing tie-in, and Dumbo actually has a point of view: the animals’. Humans are seen as exploiters out to make a buck off creatures they disregard as having no feelings. Circus life is no picnic, with perpetual toil, even in the pouring rain. The only joy the animals know is in the appearance of their new babies. But Dumbo uses his uniqueness to rise above the limitations of his world.

So I’m a sucker for the Disney ending. This is an animated film about elephants, certainly the best animated film ever made about elephants. In contrast to Walt Disney Pictures’ output the last twenty years, neither Dumbo or his mother (except in one line) are given dialogue. And I challenge anyone not to feel something when Dumbo’s mother rocks him to sleep to “Baby Mine.”

Dumbo is the forerunner of many great animated films – particularly those of Pixar – which place a premium on character performance and emotion. Key animator Bill Tytla modeled Dumbo’s childlike earnestness on that of his two-year-old son’s. This is indeed a classic. Nominated for two Academy Awards, music directors Frank Churchill and Oliver Wallace won for Best Original Music Score.