Summary Of Paul Wells 'Song Of The Roustabouts'

The “Song of the Roustabouts” and Animals In Disney’s Dumbo(1941) many of Paul Wells’s narrative strategies are apparent. These narrative strategies help enhance the feeling you get while watching the movie and allow you to connect to the characters. Ben Sharpsteen, the supervising director of Dumbo used sound, symbolism, and choreography several times while making the movie, especially in the scene when they sing the song called, “Song of the Roustabouts.”
When Dumbo, the other elephants, and the men pull up to the camp grounds they get off of the trucks and start to work. They put the circus tents together by hammering planks into the ground, pulling ropes, rolling out a mat, and many other tasks. While this is all going on the men start to sing a song. The music starts with the lyrics, “we work all day, we work all night.” These lyrics allow the viewers to learn about the men that prior to this song, they knew nothing about. The sound of the music, thunder, and wind set the mood in this scene. Paul Wells says that, …show more content…
This causes the elephants, lions, and giraffes to fall over and crash into each other. This showed me that the train was going really fast and stopped just as fast. Without the animals falling over I would not have been able to understand what the sudden brake caused. As the elephants were walking and exiting their truck, the ramp would push down as if it was going to crack. The movement of the ramp shows the viewer how heavy the elephants actually are. This shows the correspondence of the elephant, their weight, and the ramp. Paul Wells states, “animation. . . needs no recognition of weight unless it wishes to draw attention to the implications of a figure or an object actually being light or heavy.”(112) The filmmakers wanted to call special attention and show the viewers how truly big and heavy an elephant is, he was able to do that through