Dumbo genre film based on literature
Production
Development
Dumbo is based upon a children's story written by Helen Aberson-Mayer and Harold Pearl, with illustrations by Helen Durney. The children's book was first brought to the attention of Walt Disney in late 1939 by Kay Kamen, the studio's head of merchandise licensing, who showed a prototype of the Roll-A-Book that included Dumbo. Disney immediately grasped its possibilities and heartwarming story and purchased the rights to it.Originally it was intended to be a short film; however, Disney soon found that the only way to do justice to the book was to make it a feature-length film. At the time, the foreign markets in Europe had been curtailed due to World War II, which caused Pinocchio and Fantasia to fail at the box office. With the film's modest budget, Dumbo was intended to be a low-budget feature designed to bring revenue to the studio. Story artists Dick Huemer and Joe Grant were assigned to develop the plot into a feature-length film. From January 22 to March 21, 1940, they wrote a 102-page script outline in chapters, much like a book, an unusual way of writing a film script. They conceived the stork-delivery and the pink elephants sequences and had Dumbo's mother renamed from "Mother Ella" to "Mrs. Jumbo". They riffed on elephants' fear of mice by replacing a wise robin named "Red" found in the original story with the wisecracking mouse character, Timothy. They also added a "rusty black crow", which was later expanded into five. Regardless of this, very little was changed from the original draft. In March 1940, a story team headed by Otto Englander translated the outline into story sketches.
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