Seeing an Elephant Fly...And Not Much Else: A Review of Dumbo

directed by Tim Burton
written by Ehren Kruger

Of all of the beloved animated feature films that Walt Disney Studio has chosen to adapt into live-action form for modern audiences, Dumbo was arguably the one most in need of a complete overhaul. The story of a circus elephant named Dumbo with ears so big he is able to fly with them, the film was riddled with racism (it featured a murder of crows played by white actors pretending to sound like black men, led by a character named "Jim Crow" for Pete's sake), inebriation, and quite a bit of animal-on-animal cruelty. Like its more-or-less contemporary films Bambi and Pinocchio, the original Dumbo was extremely dark in tone, and was further hamstrung by blatant racism. It's no surprise, therefore, that Disney threw the old script out.

The new one, however, while free of racism and talking animals, isn't any better as far as narratives go.

Max Medici (Danny DeVito) runs the Medici Brothers Circus, a traveling attraction in America featuring the usual circus fare such as trained animals, clowns and acrobats. One of his star performers, Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns from Great War in Europe less one arm, only to find that his wife has died, all of the horses he used to ride for the circus have all been sold, and the circus itself is basically on its last legs. Medici, however, has bet all his money on one last gambit: Mrs. Jumbo, a pregnant elephant, and the beautiful baby elephant she is sure to deliver. No longer having horses to ride, Holt must now care for the elephants, which he does with his science-geek daughter Milly (Nico Parker) and his dutiful son Joe (Finley Hobbins), and in doing so they stumble upon Jumbo's newborn elephant calf, which has enormous ears. Jumbo Jr. is made part of the show, but after the audience unexpectedly jeers the poor elephant calf, and after one of Mrs. Jumbo's cruel handlers causes her to go wild, destroying the tent, Mrs. Jumbo is sold back to the person from whom Medici bought her, and Medici is at a loss as to what to do next. That is, until Farrier's children discover that Dumbo can fly. An overnight sensation, Dumbo captures the imagination of the whole country, including that of wealthy industrialist V.A. Vandermere (Michael Keaton) who runs a theme park called Dreamworld and who thinks Dumbo, when ridden by the star of his show Colette Marchant (Eva Green) will make a sensational new addition to his show. His plans, however, aren't necessarily in Dumbo's best interests.

Like the original Dumbo this film purports to be about personal triumph in the face of oppression. In the original film, the talking elephants in the circus constantly ridiculed the giant-eared Dumbo, but without talking animals, it's basically up to the human characters to stand in as the bad guys, and it is here that this film fails somewhat miserably. Sure, Tim Burton fills his cast with actors whose credentials range from stellar to basically competent, and in particular replaces Dumbo's talking mouse friend from the first film, Timothy, with a whole bunch of humans whose shortcomings, insecurities and fears are supposed to make them gravitate towards Dumbo and relate better to the audience. To be fair, most of these actors do pretty much the best they can with their roles (though Colin Farrell's Southern drawl made me wince at times), but it's ultimately the writing that lets them all down.

In the scene in which Dumbo (or Jumbo Jr., as he's called at that point in the story) is paraded before a 1920's era circus crowd, the lot of them begin screaming that he's a fake, and ridiculing him in lieu of the mean elephants from the original film. For me, that moment rings distinctly false, as does much, if not most of the film after that. If people nowadays swallow things like fake news hook, line and sinker, the level of credulity back then was arguably that much higher, and the notion that so many people would instantly react to seeing something extraordinary like a giant-eared elephant with skepticism and jeers felt distinctly inauthentic and basically set the tone for the rest of the movie. People's motivations, from that of the cruel animal handler to Michael Keaton's cut-and-paste evil tycoon, felt less like the things real people would say or do and more like plot contrivances to compensate for the characters that were cut out from the original because, ironically enough, they would not have been believable to modern audiences. It's not that there wasn't such a thing as animal cruelty in those days; the fact that animals were made to perform for humans and then kept captive shows the horrible things people were capable of back then. The problem is that Kruger and his presumed ghost writers are just so obsessed with having humans stand in for the evil cartoon characters of the original film that the humans become nothing more than cartoons themselves.

Not only that, but Kruger fills his world with far too much baggage that doesn't really go anywhere, and basically doesn't add anything to the characters. Farrell's Holt loses his arm in the war and his wife to sickness, so he's clearly supposed to be a tragic character, but what specifically is his journey here? Does his having one arm represent an obstacle he has to overcome? Not really, it seems. DeVito's Max Medici inexplicably, packages his circus as "Medici Brothers" when he doesn't even have a brother, and the script basically does next to nothing with that, other than a throwaway line of dialogue from Vandemere. I'd say spoiler alert, but that little detail contributes nothing to the plot. Speaking of Vandemere, he feels a distinct step down from the last heavy Michael Keaton played; the working class Vulture, who actually made a pretty compelling argument to Spider-Man about who were good guys and who were bad guys. Eva Green's Colette, Burton's apparent new goth-girl muse, isn't anything more than yet another narrative cliche. Not every detail has to have a reason for being there, but when one's characters are as paper-thin as the ones with which Kruger has populated this world, seemingly insignificant details start to matter, as does their overall pointlessness.

Saddled with this limp script, Burton leans on his tried-and-tested tropes; quirky supporting characters, a choir belting out Danny Elfman's score, which we've heard in numerous other movies either by Burton or Sam Raimi, and some echoes of the visual panache that shot him to the A-list back in the 1980s. Unfortunately, one other aspect he brings to the film from his past work is an inordinately dark color palette, which is distinctly out of place in a Disney film. As much as I hated Burton's other Disney live-action regurgitation, Alice in Wonderland, at least it was appropriately colorful. Here, despite the fact that the story is set in a circus, most of the action looks like it's taking place at night, probably in an attempt to mask any flaws in the computer generated visual effects.

Fortunately, for all of its flaws, the film at least gets one thing right: Dumbo himself, especially when he's flying. I may be jaded about a lot of things, including movies, but even I can admit that these sequences, basically the "money shots" of the film felt uplifting, with the visuals, sound-editing and score all melding together in perfect unison. Sure Burton kind of started leaning on it a little bit, but given that it was the one thing about the movie that really worked, I can't really blame him. It's somewhat ironic (again) that some of the early comments that surfaced about the trailer were about how creepy the CGI version of Dumbo looked. In my opinion, that's one of the few things that Burton and his crew got right.

My younger kids enjoyed the film, and I can understand why, but to families with a limited budget for movies I'd recommend saving up for Aladdin and The Lion King instead.

5.5/10