How does this ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ sequence differ aesthetically from the rest of the film. Why do you think Disney might have included it?

In order to understand this scene we should put it into the context of the film itself: In the ‘Pink Elephants on Parade’ sequence, Dumbo and Timothy have dreams of Pink elephants from being drunk. It is a particularly sad moment for the elephant which can’t find his place and has just lost his family and when his friend notices that he has hiccups he suggest to drink some water which after reveals to be Champaign. The animation of the pink elephants is characterised by “metamorphosis” where continuity of the storytelling is archived by the association of images and colours: this technique allowed the animators to connect apparently unrelated images. In this case is a very useful tool to combine dreams, or hallucinations, with reality. The overall colours are very saturated and varied and the characters’ animations are particularly distorted and malleable which make it easier to transform them into shapes. This sequence stands out from the rest of the film for its very distinctive style and the lack of hyperrealism that characterises the other animations in the rest of scenes: the elephants floats in the air, they seems weightless, they are “full of impossible movements and fantastic visions” as Steven Schneider says; that is because this particular sequence was animated by animators from the East coast (who tended to emphasised artifice, nonlinear narrative just like Fleischer and Van Beuren did) who studied animation in New York. In the same film we can notice two different character designs for the elephants: the anthropomorphic Dumbo and the Pink Elephants who, other than having no eyes, they have a more “gothic” design, implying the strangeness of the scene. This scene, as uncorrelated as it might seem, leads actually to a crucial change in Dumbos life: he can use his ears to fly (because of the hallucinations he and his mouse friend had they found themselves the next morning on top of a tree).

Reference

 the Guardian. 2021. Why I love … Dumbo’s pink elephants. [online] Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/aug/16/why-i-love-dumbo-pink-elephants> [Accessed 18 October 2021].