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7 Excellent But Morally Problematic Movies

Movies possess a power over popular culture, one that is diminishing but nevertheless impossible to ignore. They have the ability to broadly influence people in a way that perhaps no other form of art/entertainment is currently able to do. With that great power, it is said, subsequently comes great responsibility. So for as long as it has been culturally significant, film has for many people been the subject of a certain moral requirement, that it should teach its huge audiences how to be righteous while it entertains their attention.

[h2]3: Dumbo[/h2]

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Many opinion-makers insist that Snow White, the one that started it all, is Disney’s best animated film. I say this was only true until Pinocchio came out three years later. But the one movie that was the apex of Disney’s early animated years is, to my mind, Dumbo, which combines the bizarre experimentalism best demonstrated by the “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence with the beautiful and devastating “Baby Mine” montage, featuring Mrs. Jumbo rocking Dumbo with her trunk through the metal bars behind which she has been caged. Heartbreaking stuff.

It would be a nearly perfect movie if not for the awkward racial components, including the fact that all the circushands are black guys who don’t have faces for some odd reason, but more famously, the Jim Crow scene. Yes, it’s important to the movie that birds talk about Dumbo the elephant learning to fly. I’m not entirely sure what statement they’re trying to make by depicting these birds as crows, with their leader going by the name of Jim, and having them speak in jive and act as classic black stereotypes. Most commentators seem to find this racist, and I’m in no position to offer a strong counterargument. It seems more odd than anything to me, as if the filmmakers were trying for something and it just fell flat and ended up like a failed Michael Richards routine. I find it less nefarious than the awful racism of later movies Peter Pan and The Jungle Book, but still kind of puts a damper on how sweet the rest of the movie is.

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