1940-41 mark Disney’s greatest experiment with Ballet, and particularly with the sounds of Paris two to three decades earlier, and the Ballet Russes. And while only explicitly this can be found in the Rite of Spring in Fantasia so are the great teachers of the age included there: Dukas from the Paris Conservatoire and Rimsky Korsakov in St Petersberg. But more than this, Dumbo is unimaginable without Parade and Le Boeuf sur le Toit (although quotation abounds in the score and as the train grinds to a halt you might hear an echo too of Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel, and the film is perhaps most interesting in a treatment of the representation of labour by Mickey and Dumbo that continues a tradition from those great Wagnerian workers, Hans Sachs the cobbler and Mime the forger – and there’s no mistake that the motif of the sorcerer’s apprentice is rhythmically so similar to the work motif from the Ring.) But the relation to ballet, and the use of Ballet’s tableaux forms, especially after Stravinsky, are crucial to understanding what Disney is up to. For this reason the sober assessment by Kracauer on the entry of reality into these works, and the critique of the entry of magical charms as the mode of animation proper, makes a mistake. These are not films that awaken stupidly from the dream-space of animation in order to justify their real movement, but they long for the strain and torsion of bodies that had only recently given form to the stasis of the great balletic tableaux. It would be easy to make Benjaminian quips here about war technologies as Dumbo becomes a bomber, as a body is redeemed through a newly destructive technical physis, but again the mistake would be to imagine the nature of the animated body as one freed from strain and tension. The question Disney is asking is one of time and damage in the body of the elephant, and this is only answered by a question posed about how ballet can be danced by those whose bodies have *already* been disposed of by the newest techniques.