The movie takes place in 1913 and opens with an introduction to the Medici Brothers Circus, a not too successful enterprise that owner Max Medici (Danny DeVito) has been having a hard time keeping afloat, what with attendance dropping as audiences lose interest in his increasingly shrinking traveling show. Enter Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), a returning World War One veteran hoping to rekindle his old life as a circus performer, but having lost an arm in the war his ability as a trick rider is questionable at best. Is that depressing enough for you? Well, we also meet Holt’s two children, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins), who have been living as circus orphans while he was off fighting the Hun, and they’ve been on their own due to their mother having died of influenza. Yikes, it’s good to see Disney hasn’t gotten tired of the “Dead Parent” trope yet. Now, those of you familiar with the original Dumbo may be scratching your collective heads and wondering, “Where is Dumbo, and who are all these people?”
Is Tim Burton remaking Dumbo or his own film Big Fish?
Eventually, Dumbo does arrive, Medici having purchased a pregnant Indian Elephant to hopefully boost attendance, and before you can sing the first verse of “When I see an elephant fly” we find Milly and Joe teaching a big-eared baby elephant to fly. This film literally jumps to Dumbo flying at the bloody twenty-minute mark, where the original film had Dumbo learning to fly as the story’s climax this movie seems more concerned with giving modern viewers – who the producers of this film clearly believe have no patience – immediate scenes of their CGI atrocity flying. This brings us to another key problem with this film, making a live-action flying elephant look believable. The animated format is perfectly suited for this kind of thing, photorealism not so much, and throughout this film, Dumbo veered between cute and grotesque, with his big floppy CGI ears looking especially terrible. The best this film gets. with the effects on full display, is when it looks like somebody glued fake ears on a real elephant.When photorealism and fantasy collide with mixed results.
Of course having a film about a failing circus and a crippled war veteran trying to reconnect with his children, all while teaching an elephant to fly, is still apparently not enough to fill two-hour running time, because this film also has villains, lots and lots of villains. The original film had bitchy pachyderms and asshole clowns but that’s not enough for Tim Burton, not on his watch, so we have one of Medici’s animal handlers who gets off on animal cruelty – it’s his death that leads to Dumbo’s mom being declared a rogue elephant – and then we get the film’s chief antagonist in the form of a rich New York showman named V. A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), who comes looking to acquire this amazing flying elephant for his massive amusement park. Keaton’s portrayal of Vandevere is one part P.T. Barnum and two parts evil Walt Disney, with no piece of scenery left unchewed, and to make matters worse he also employs a bald evil henchmen so that we can have someone to menace the children. Is Vandevere supposed to be a showman or a Bond villain?His park also looks a lot like Pleasure Island from Pinocchio.
194l’s Dumbo was a short picture telling the simplistic story of a little elephant learning to accept his differences, embracing them, and then becoming a star. Now, with Tim Burton’s version we still have Dumbo learning to accept who he is – though this comes through a pep talk from Milly instead of Timothy Mouse – we also get Holt coming to grips with his disability, Milly’s desire to pursue a life of scientific exploration, Medici futilely trying to keep his troupe together against the evil machinations of Vandevere, and then to top it all off we also have the character of Collette (Eva Green), a trapeze artists working for Vandevere, who sides with our heroes so we can a love interest for Holt, because the story of Dumbo has always been missing a love story. It’s nice that this version ditched the racist crows but by god did they overstuff this thing.And what kind of Dumbo movie would you have if you didn’t also include a theme park turning into a fiery conflagration of death and destruction?
Stray Observations:
• No talking animals in this film, so no storks bringing baby animals to the circus – we do get one shot of stork outside Mama Jumbo’s window – and Timothy Mouse is just a pet mouse belonging to Milly.
• This makes Milly’s pep talk to Dumbo at the end of the film rather odd. Can Dumbo understand English?
• The heartbreaking rendition of “Baby Mine” is now performed by an overweight woman with a ukulele. What the hell?
• Dumbo gets a WWE style introduction, “Let’s get ready for Dummmmmboooooo!” That is just sad.
• The nightmare fuel sequence of Dumbo drunk and hallucinating “Pink Elephants on Parade” is replaced with showgirls creating giant animated bubble elephants that traipse through the air of Vandevere's Coliseum.
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