The original 'Dumbo' arguably was Disney's most important blockbuster

In the early 1940s, this newspaper wrote repeatedly in gushing terms about an animated picture from Walt Disney, one in which it was declared that any faults "do not come to mind while seeing the film."

It was not 1940's "Pinocchio," regarded today as a groundbreaking work in effects animation and arguably still one of Disney's more intrinsically detailed, emotionally expansive movies.

Nor was it that year's "Fantasia," a musical experiment that made the case that animation should not be regarded as just a vital American art form but taken as seriously as any medium. ("Fantasia," of course, is also the picture that has given us the signature image of Mickey Mouse in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," itself a showstopping work of animation