Tim Burton Breaks Down Dumbo's Parade Scene With Colleen Atwood

Okay, okay, let me say it again.

This one's gonna be perfect, watch this.

Hi I'm Tim Burton, director of Disney's Dumbo.

I'm Colleen Atwood, costume designer for Dumbo.

And this is Notes On a Scene.

[Jazz music]

I wish Mom could've seen this.

Somehow, I think she knows we're here.

This is where they bring Dumbo to Dreamland.

They go from the Medici little family circus

to the big city and big dreamland.

It's like a early version of Disneyland really.

[Colleen] This kind of shows the magic of the world

that these people are seeing

for the first time in their lives.

All this was blue.

That was an amazing thing.

We had the whole set, which was an old blimp factory.

All this was built, the gates were built,

all this was built, all this was built.

We tried to build as many sets as we could,

because it not only helps me, the actors.

It makes you feel more like you're there,

so everybody can connect with the feeling and the emotions.

Obviously for all the people, the actors,

it was easy, because the stars have a big parade.

[Colleen] All these people were real.

A lot of movies that'd all be fake,

but on this one we had all the real people there.

We had all the circus performers performing,

so everyone was kind of swept up

into the whole spectacle of the place.

It's like when you first time you go to a place

when your a kid, Disneyland or whatever.

You see things in a heightened way.

I really think in that moment with the actors themselves,

like Michael, and Eva, and everybody, they were like wow.

You really felt like in this moment on the movie

you were working on something special.

Something that doesn't happen very often in movies anymore.

That everything was real

and you were in this magnificent, old movie.

Everybody gets into that energy,

which is different if all this was green.

I've done green screen stuff and you go insane,

because you don't know what you're looking at.

You don't have any focal point,

so it really does help everybody.

The balloons are red, white, and blue,

but the costumes really are not.

I didn't use traditional circus colors,

because I didn't want to.

It was really important that it had a patina to it.

That it wasn't just those primaries,

which again really helped with this lighting.

And also there just kinda off colors.

It's kind of like Vegas-y.

Dirty yellow, dirty reds, dirty blues,

that was a really, to me, an important part of the design

of the costumes for the film.

Way to work your magic Max.

[horse neighs]

[Dumbo squeals]

I hear you Dumbo.

This was movie was very unusual for me

in the sense that the main character

didn't really materialize until the very, very end.

Like about a couple weeks ago.

It's strange that you have all of this surrounding.

You have everything built,

you have all these amazing actors,

and they're all acting to nothing.

Nothing to something, the main character's not there.

It's a very odd thing to do,

because everything else is materialized except for that.

And the one thing Tim did,

I think that really helped the kids,

is he had a actual actor in a green suit that was Dumbo.

So for them, they had the perspective of distance

from how far away Dumbo was,

and they could actually have something to react to

other than just oh Dumbo's over there.

And he studied elephant movements.

He really knew how to give it the flavor of him.

It goes back to great silent movie characters.

You just get your feelings just from their eyes.

That's what I love with a lot of the actors I work with,

is what they project out of their eyes.

With animals you know sometimes there's a connection

that's very deep and transcends a human animal and connects.

That's what we tried to give Dumbo.

Real Elephants eyes are on the sides of their heads,

so you had to move Dumbo's eyes forward to communicate.

It was a funny challenge to try to get the balance

of fantasy and reality with the look of the character.

[horse neighs]

[old time music]

We have Dumbo's point of view

just give him a little bit of Dumbo vision,

because he's the main character.

You felt what he was kinda seeing.

The one thing I did think from Tim,

that makes him really special as a director,

is he understands the characters.

He understands Dumbo in a unique way.

I realized when I started talking to Tim,

that he would sort of say these little things

and I'd go okay he's seeing whatever this moment is

through Dumbo's eyes.

Sometimes the hem, or the shoe,

or different things that Dumbo would see because he's small

become more important than the big wide shot

of everybody's costumes and everything.

People thought I was obsessed by women's shoes,

but no, it was for that particular reason.

It was fun to examine the world from a new perspective,

which is in design a really great challenge.

For costumes for a circus parade,

these ladies here are in the show later.

But we didn't wanna reveal the costumes in the parade,

so sort of at the last minute, I made these capes

that are sort of like umbrella or circus tent things

with sequins sewn on 'em.

I think we made 'em in a day and half

for all the girls.

I made the headdresses like gluing feathers on

on the morning of.

The quality of the costume is so beautiful and textural

and worked so well both for look and performance.

It really helped with attitude and feeling of the performers

and everybody, because they felt it.

Revel won't let him see outside.

Remember your name, Mystique.

I hadn't talked to Mike for almost 20 years.

Last time I worked with him, he was in a Batman suit,

and he didn't like that very much.

So it was funny,

now on this one it's like a complete opposite.

Everything that we did, everything that Micheal did

was for the good of the character,

but it was also for quickness and comfort.

But, all in a good way.

[Colleen] He was anti-tie from the start.

That's where the great idea for the cravat came up.

This is Marge on the sith.

She was such a great character, our Mer.

It's really not her body.

From here to here,

I pad it out to make her look more fishlike.

Sometimes you have to add things

to the human body and exaggerate it

to make it work in a costume

that's different than how you would

in a nonperforming sort of costume.

These uniforms, as we had the circus go along.

[Tim] These were based on early Disney guards.

It was a pre-polyester period of uniforms

for people that worked at theme parks.

You get inspired.

You walk into the costume department

and see all these things, and textures, and stuff.

Me and everybody else, the DP, the actors,

it's a creative thing.

It's not a singular thing.

You don't make a film about yourself,

so it's important and great to work

with other great artists.

It's an inclusive process.

And when you try to exclude people from your process,

it limits what you can do.

[cheerful music]

A point from me making Dumbo was like the feeling

that I remember feeling watching old Disney movies

where you get a mixture of feelings:

joy, happiness, sadness, loss,

everything that Disney movies had.

So that was the goal with this,

is to just try to create a simple fable

about weirdos finding your place in the world really.

When I first started working at Disney,

that's how I felt, a strange, weird, outcast

like most animators.

I think that story always just the symbol of that

is the weird character that doesn't fit in,

who's got what people might think as a weirdness

or disability, and then he used it as a beautiful advantage.

I think that that simple story about that and

you know finding your place in the world,

and who you are, and what you are,

is something that always hit me with Dumbo.