Dumbo

1941, US, Walt Disney, 64 min, English

Introduced by mask designer Max Dana

If you believe in yourself, you can fly too. This upbeat message is at the heart of Dumbo, the fourth animated Disney feature. The film is based upon a storyline written by Helen Aberson and illustrated by Harold Pearl for the prototype of a novelty toy (“Roll-a-Book”). But it is not all charm: it also contains one of the most hair-raising hallucinatory nightmare scenes in all of animation.

About the Introducer

Max Dana is a Brooklyn-based theater artist and mask maker. Initially trained as a playwright at Yale University, Max later studied physical theater at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris and mask design with Donato Sartori at the Center for Masks and Gestural Structures in Italy. Recent credits include Immediate Medium’s The Assassins Chase Pinocchio and The Future at the End of the World, mask design for Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, and Trusty Sidekick’s The Haunting of Ichabod Crane (Park Avenue Armory 2014), which he co-directed with Jonathan Shmidt. He currently serves as technology lead for ArtsPool.