Sometimes people like to tell you that little kids can’t be lied to, or they somehow see to the truth of things, or that in their eyes you, as person operating in the adult world of lies and deception and pregnant subtext, will be made naked before them. Naked metaphorically, I’m talking here. This, of course, isn’t true. Kids can be lied to about facts, just like everyone else.
What kids can’t be lied to about is entertainment value. Kids know what’s entertaining and what’s not entertaining much better than adults because they don’t get muddled by literary allusions, intellectual investigations, subtle uses of color and light, or the way your use of male characters brings across the impotence of patriarchy in fin de siècle America. Or whatever.
They care about storytelling and ethics. Can you hold their attention, and can you show them that this scary, strange, chaotic world might have some island of safety somewhere? That’s it.
Which is why every kid’s movie is about learning to believe in yourself. (Except Pixar movies, which are all about friendship, but we’ll get to that in some other column.) Every kid’s movie is about how those things you hate about yourself turn out to be the very things that make you unique and useful in the world. Most of the movies I’ve talked about so far are ones that I saw after puberty, after high school and college and grad school and Syd Field and Andre Bazin and Harold Bloom and getting paid to write about movies.
But Dumbo is different. Dumbo was the very first animated feature I remember watching. My step-father had it on VHS. He had a bunch of stuff on VHS in a huge cabinet right next to his wood-paneled TV. He’d listed every movie in his collection in a little black three-ring binder on college-ruled paper, with the title, length, tape-number and counter-number written out in precise block letters.
My stepdad was black, my mom’s white. Actually my real dad’s black too, but the point is that when I was a kid I was in an obviously multiracial family. I grew up in a pretty rough neighborhood in Richmond, California where I was the only mixed-race kid around. So when I tell you that I identified with Dumbo, it’s not just because I’ve seen my fair share of pink elephants on parade.
Dumbo is the artist’s version of the ugly duckling story. As you must know, Dumbo is a little elephant with big ears who can’t play any of the elephant games. He messes up the tricks, he can’t get anything right, and when his mother gets mad trying to protect him from the teasing, she’s thrown in a cage. When Dumbo ends up in a tree after downing some hallucinogenic Champagne, his mouse buddy realizes Dumbo can fly. But after a lifetime of taunting, Dumbo just doesn’t have the self-confidence to take the leap of faith that flying requires. So his mouse buddy (Timothy Q. Mouse!) comes up with one of the greatest movie-objects in history: the magic feather. The feather, of course, isn’t a magic feather at all, it’s just a feather – but Timothy Q. Mouse knows that until Dumbo learns that those stupid ears of his are a benefit rather than a curse, he needs a crutch.
Back on that block in Richmond, my biggest deficit was that I was half black and half white, and none of the kids knew what box to put me in. Which was tough, but it meant that if I had just the right amount of self-confidence – I could step into different worlds. The black kids, the white kids, the Latino kids, the Jewish kids, I could befriend all of them. I wouldn’t ever quite be part of their world, but I could certainly visit them – all because of this thing I’d thought of as a flaw.
I love that magic feather. I think about it a lot. Whether it’s a friend’s kind word, or a particularly kind letter of recommendation from a mentor, or a paycheck for my thoughts about te movies I love, there are all sorts of magic feathers out there.
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