But while the elephant in the room was being dealt with, the pachyderm in the air remained an issue. “There’s just not much to rely upon regarding the physics of flying baby elephant ears,” declares Stammers. “So we took the flight cycle from a large bird and applied that for a series of animation tests that were aimed at letting us see what might work, that you would believe an elephant could fly. There wasn’t anything in the original film’s animation that helped us convey an actual physicality to his flying, so it was definitely new ground being pioneered, to make it feel right with that weight. There wasn’t going to be any single solution that was enough in and of itself. This required us to make a leap of faith when depicting something that weighs 80 kilos [176 lbs.] and flies by flapping its ears.”

Stammers recalls Burton being much impressed with MPC’s character work on The Jungle Book. “Facility skillsets is a major factor when deciding how to award the work,” he acknowledges. “MPC did a marvelous job matching the set lighting, which got us about 90% of the way there pretty quickly with their lighting model. But since Dumbo is the star, there was the matter of adding another pass, one that makes the hero character the focus of the scene, much as beauty lighting on set brings out the lead actor and actress. We’d often add small levels of bounce light to fill in the shadow side of Dumbo’s face.”

Production’s creature effects team was able to build a full-size practical Dumbo, textured with appropriate skin and hair, and even correct eye color, for use on set. “Even though it was not 100% accurate to what we eventually finalized during post, it was definitely close enough in scale and color to be a very useful lighting reference in every live-action setup shot by [director of photography] Ben Davis. He could see how the physical stand-in would read, and in darker scenes he would know to add lights to suggest kicks and glints in the eyes. So when we shot our HDRIs and silver/ gray balls, it let us match his work with our CG lighting when adding CG Dumbo into the plates. Sometimes we might embellish the eye glint, because those caustics in the eye really helped bring his iris to life.”

Burton also made use of a small green-suited performer who could stand in for Dumbo on set. “We put a kind of tortoise shell on his back so the actors could seem to have physical interaction with the character. Sometimes the actions would have to get painted out if the scene evolved, but it was enough so that Tim could direct the scene with confidence.”