Walt Disney animation studios history

Chapter 4: dumbo

After Pinocchio and Fantasia became embarrassing box office failures, Walt had to produce something cheap and fast in order to make up for the losses of his previous features. The result?

It's the story of a baby elephant named Dumbo whom upon being delivered by the stork to his mother in the circus was discovered to have massive ears even bigger than his whole body. While he may have been ridiculed for his ears by both the circus audience and the other elephants, a mouse named Timothy befriends Dumbo and aids him to turn his humiliation into triumph that can make him fly, quite literally in fact

Just like with Pinocchio, the idea came to Walt in late 1939 when one of his employees, this time the head of merchandise licensing Kay Kamen, showed him a prototype of a toy called Roll-A-Book. It was like a children's book, but instead of flipping the pages, kids would have to roll the wheels to read the story like a scroll. In it was a story called Dumbo by the couple Helen Aberson-Mayer and Harold Pearl, and Walt saw the strong potential to adapt it into animation

It was originally just going to be a Silly Symphony short, but it was then decided to be a feature so that the story could be told better. That and considering the serious financial troubles caused by the downfall of Pinocchio and Fantasia, the simplicity of the story would help to have this be a low-budget film. Once he settled to have Dumbo be his next movie, Walt gave the writing duties to Joe Grant and Dick Huemer who were not only in charge of adapting the story but to also add new scenes and change up a few things like a red robin character that would help Dumbo on his journey