“Dumbo”‏

by richibi

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                                                           “View of Murnau“
        
                                                           Wassily Kandinsky
 
                                                      ______________________
 
 
once again a movie for children of all ages – 
including for Zoë, incidentally, whose birth
date is coming up in May – “Dumbo“ is another
Walt Disney masterpiece, and once again
fraught with the tropes, the creative novelties
and devices, of the most modern arts
 
it’s not difficult to intuit the influence of
Saint-Saëns‘ – an awful lot of sibilants
in the possessive case of only those two
capitalized syllables, by the way – his, I say,

especially, of the elephants, for Disney‘s
famous sequence here of elephants on
parade, wherein psychedelia makes an
appearance in 1941 no less, years ahead
of its historical, and revolutionary, great
fruition, surely informing Warhol,
generally the entire Pop Art coterie 
 
he was transferring however what he’d
been learning from the German especially 
Expressionists, their attraction to bold,
dissonant colours, flat uninflected
surfaces, arbitrary and malleable
dimensions    
 
what Disney brought significantly to the
mix was essentially the spirit of fun, which
is what transformed all art after the First
World War, that generation’s response to
the utter failure of all that had come before,
politics, economics, ideologies, even the
very concept of the existence of God, none
of these had prevented the horror that had
been that signal event, the best defence, as
we said in the Seventies, was living well,
therefore the Roaring Twenties, therefore,
for that matter, the Seventies 
 
we haven’t retreated from that imperative
yet, be it for better or for worse remains
still to be seen, for faith or fun, the opposite
poles of personal responsibility, both fell 
and heal 
 
 
animals, incidentally, courtesy of the spirit
 
 
Richard