#4 Dumbo

Dumbo serves as the point of birth for one of Disney's staple plot concepts: take an adorable tiny animal and make them suffer horribly (and really, what's more adorable than baby elephants?). It's also one of the few films to have a silent protagonist; the animators do the work of making Dumbo emote purely through action and expression, while Timothy Q. Mouse serves as the driving force behind the plot and provider of exposition. The pair of them are a perfectly charming duo, making up for the rather thin and extremely short plot (which seems to be a hallmark of Golden Age Disney). The rest of the animals and humans are stylized, but appealing, although some of the character models seem to have been cribbed from either Pinocchio or "Dance of the Hours."

The biggest strength of Dumbo is Disney's ever-present ability to wrest genuine emotion of of seemingly any material. Dumbo himself is just such a sympathetic protagonist for whom nothing goes right for the majority of the film that it's impossible for an audience not to connect with him (seriously, I cannot stress this enough, Dumbo is the most adorable thing ever designed by Disney). Visually, the colorful, whimsical circus atmosphere is captured perfectly through the artwork and music (I haven't touched on it much, but the music in early Disney films holds up remarkably well, far better than most films of the time). The animators do still take some time to indulge themselves, notably in the sequence of setting up the circus in a rainstorm (it seems like there has to be at least one rainy scene in every Disney film) and the notorious "Pink Elephants on Parade," rendered in a striking color-on-black style.

However well most aspects of Dumbo hold up, it was still made in 1941, and some antiquated cultural attitudes are bound to come through - specifically, a group of crows intended as African-American caricatures that break the playful mood of the film somewhat for modern audiences. It's a bit off-putting, but not enough to drag the film down. While brief and definitely best enjoyed by children, Dumbo still manages to be as charming today as it ever was.