Does anyone really remember Dumbo? I mean, sure, we’ve all seen it. We have vague memories of a mute baby elephant with gargantuan ears, and he could fly...and wasn’t there, like, a mouse that wasn’t Mickey but still wore clothes for some reason? In the stack of VHS tapes, this was one I always skipped over, in favor of The Lion King, or the greatest film in the history of cinema, The Emperor’s New Groove. Rare was the day that I watched Dumbo.

Because, let’s be clear—it’s a weird, weird movie. Even as a kid, I saw that, even though I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why. As I got older, though,I saw that it wasn’t just strange; it was random, disturbing, and quite often, rather offensive. I mean, there’s the mistreatment of animals. There’s all this racial stuff (Like what, you ask? Well, there’s a crow named Jim Crow who’s voiced by a African-American man, and then in the lovely ditty “Song of the Roustabouts,” all the dark-skinned circus workers who “never learned to read or write” sing about how they “slave until they’re almost dead.” Yeah.) And then, there’s the nightmare inducing drug-trip sequence where Dumbo gets drunk. It’s terrifying, and in no way contributes to the plot.

If all this sounds unappealing, you’re probably right. Walt Disney once claimed that Dumbo was his favorite film he made, calling it “a really a happy picture from beginning to end.” I hate to break it to you, Walt, but Dumbo is not a happy movie. It’s dark and weird and controversial. By all rights, this movie should not be worth watching. But I think it is.

In fact, I’ll go as far as to say it is a powerful and important film. Yes, this is the same movie I was ragging on earlier. I warned you in the title of this article: I’m going to get serious about a cartoon elephant. You see, I think that, at its core, Dumbo is a story about love.

First and foremost, Dumbo is about the love a mother has for its child. There’s been a lot of great parent-child relationships in movies—Scout and Atticus, Simba and Mufasa, Steve Martin and his dozen kids—but there’s something so emotionally impactful about the relationship between Mrs. Jumbo and little Dumbo. Yes, I just wrote that sentence. But honestly! Mrs. Jumbo is Dumbo’s great protector. She shields him from the taunts of the other animals and circus-goers. The circus is pretty terrible place to live, and all that Dumbo and Mrs. Jumbo have in the whole world is each other. And yet, that is enough.

Just watch this scene where Mrs. Jumbo comforts Dumbo from the confines of her cage. Mrs. Jumbo has been imprisoned after lashing out at circus-goers making fun of Dumbo, and now they are separated indefinitely. But in this moment, as they are together, all the misery and horror of existence fades away. All that remains is love, and that can and will sustain them. Powerful stuff.

Secondly, Dumbo is about loving oneself. Little Dumbo is severely affected—handicapped, one might say—by his overlarge ears. He can hardly move, is tormented ceaselessly, and is constantly reminded just how different he really is. You want to talk about emotional? Well, watch a big fat tear roll down Dumbo’s cheek when someone calls him a freak, and then see how you feel! And worst of all, he starts to believe it.

That is, until he discovers that what makes him different is what makes him special. Spoiler: he can fly. When Dumbo discovers this, he begins to accept himself. Dumbo’s story speaks to something that many of us would do well to understand: we are different, but it’s only in learning to love those differences that we can move forward. That’s easier said than done, of course. But it can be done.

So what about all that stuff at the beginning, the mistreatment and the racial stuff and bizarreness of this 1941 animated film? That stuff is definitely there. But—spoiler alert—real life has all of that, too. And we certainly shouldn’t promote that stuff, but we should recognize it as reality. And beyond that, there is goodness to be found in the darkness. Is Dumbo a perfect movie? No way. But it still has something important to say, for young and old alike, about the power of love in the midst of our complicated lives. Yes, really.

So, there it was. My analysis of Walt Disney Picture’s fourth animated feature, Dumbo. It’s still a really weird movie. I mean, this image will always wake me up in a cold sweat:

But, the movie also has this:

So, yeah. It can’t be all that bad.