july 25th

This day in disney history

2007:

A press release announces that the Walt Disney Company has made a commitment to end cigarette smoking in Disney-branded films. Disney will discourage depictions of cigarette smoking in its films and will place an anti-smoking PSA on DVD's of any future film that does depict smoking.

picture of the day


tom sawyer island

Disney fun fact of the day

Dumbo was made to recoup the financial losses of Fantasia. The film has been criticized as being racist (the leader crow in the film is named "Jim Crow"), yet is also considered to be one of Disney's finest films. It was a deliberate pursuit of simplicity and economy for the Disney studio, and is now generally regarded as a classic of animation. At 64 minutes, it is one of Disney's shortest animated features.

The film was designed as an economical feature to help generate income for the Disney studio after the financial failures of both Pinocchio and Fantasia in 1940. Storymen Dick Huemer and Joe Grant were the primary figures in developing the plot, based upon a children's book written by Helen Aberson and illustrated by Harold Perl (the only involvement the authors had with the cartoon industry). Their book was made of only 8 drawings and just a few lines of text. When it was published in 1939, the edition was so small and obscure that nobody knows how Disney got his hands on it. He gave it to his lead animators and told them to see what they could get out of it.

When the film went into production in early 1941, supervising director Ben Sharpsteen was given orders to keep the film simple and inexpensive. As a result, Dumbo lacks the lavish detail of the previous three Disney animated features (Fantasia, Pinocchio, and character designs are simpler, background paintings are less detailed, and a number of held cels (or frames) were used in the character animation.

Despite the advent of World War II, Dumbo was still the most financially successful Disney film of the 1940s. This was one of the first of Disney's animated films to be broadcast, albeit severely edited, on television, as part of Disney's anthology series. The film then received another distinction of note in 1981, when it was the first of Disney's canon of animated films to be released on home video and also was released in the Walt Disney Classics Video Collection in 1985. That release was followed by remastered versions in: 1986, 1989, 1991 (Classics), and 1994 (Masterpiece). In 2001, a 60th Anniversary Special Edition was released. In 2006, a "Big Top Edition" of the film was released on DVD. A UK Special Edition was released in May 2007 and was a successful Disney release.