Dumbo began life in the late 1930s as a prototype for a novelty device called Roll-A-Book, which presented illustrated children’s stories on a long scroll, like a portable moving panorama. The authorship is somewhat contested, but three people were involved to some degree in the creation of “Dumbo, the Flying Elephant”: Helen Aberson Mayer, Harold Pearl (Mayer’s husband at the time), and illustrator Helen Durney. Animation historian Michael Barrier has traced the story’s path to the screen from there: Fred O’Hara, who ran a Norwich knitting mill that had made a killing selling licensed Mickey Mouse sweatshirts, bought the rights to the story along with the Roll-A-Book device. He then tried to sell the gimmick to Disney’s merchandising guru Herman Kamen, who passed it along to story editor John Clarke Rose, who brought it to Disney. Disney passed on the Roll-A-Book, but bought the rights to “Dumbo, the Flying Elephant.” It wasn’t long enough for a feature, but golden age animators Joe Grant and Dick Huemer padded the story out, and supervising director Ben Sharpsteen worked with a team of four other sequence directors to get it on screen. Anyway, here’s the first trailer for one-time Disney animator Tim Burton’s upcoming live-action remake, which comes from a screenplay by Ehren Kruger that is based on the creative work of hundreds of people, from toy inventors to knitting mill magnates, most of it done decades before Burton was born. Or, as the trailer has it, “From the imagination of Tim Burton.”
from Stories from Slate https://ift.tt/2PqYoC5
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