Thread by @juliagalef

1) "Pink elephants on parade," the dream sequence in Dumbo, is 100% nightmare fuel, full of grinning, mutating grotesques:

Did you ever wonder what it was doing in the middle of Dumbo? Not just tonally but stylistically anomalous in a Disney kids' movie?

2) I did, and today I found out

There were two main schools of animation in the early 20th century: West Coast & East Coast

West coast is what you think of as classic "Disney" - naturalistic characters, moving in naturalistic ways. Stories were wholesome and conveyed some moral

3) East coast (NY) was not naturalistic or wholesome. Characters moved like they were made out of rubber; "stories" were a dreamlike series of happenings, only loosely connected; tone was often dark and surreal, w/themes like death, drugs & sex

E.g

4) Walt Disney's studio employed some East Coast animators, but West Coast style was dominant

Until Dumbo in 1940. Walt Disney himself managed it at first, but then gave up on the project because dealing with WWII, striking workers, etc. was occupying too much of his resources

5) Disney's absence left a power vacuum into which stepped his colleagues Dick Huemer and Joe Grant, two veterans of the East Coast school

They rewrote the movie & added the Pink Elephants sequence

And that is why generations of kids have suffered nightmares since 1941. The end

(P.S. I learned most of this from this paper, "Regionalism in Disney Animation: Pink Elephants and Dumbo" by Mark Langer: jstor.org/stable/3815059)

(P.P.S. Sorry for messing up my threading so badly at first that I had to redo the thread)