Disney’s live action Dumbo is the first of a slew of live action remakes of animated Disney classics slated to hit theaters this year. Tim Burton’s film does its best to capture what makes Dumbo a classic, but it’s not without its shortcomings, which suddenly makes me very worried for the other live action remakes scheduled for later this year.
Dumbo, as you probably know, is the story of a circus elephant born with large ears that can fly. The original cartoon was an animal story with very little human interaction, but Burton’s take changes all of that. Colin Farrell stars as Holt, a one-armed war vet just back from the front lines of the great war in France. He family works for the Medici circus, ran by Danny Devito’s Max Medici. Holt’s two kids, Milly and Joe (Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins), and his wife, stayed in the business while Holt went off the fight, but the wife died and the circus raised the two kids. Holt was a bronco rider before he left, something he can’t do now with only one arm, so Max puts him in charge of the elephants, and one in particular, Jumbo, is pregnant.
Jumbo gives birth to the young calf with large ears and Milly and Joe discover that he can fly when he snorts a feather. A flying elephant attracts the crowds and soon makes national news, where in New York, V.A. Vandervere (Michael Keaton), a wealthy theme park owner takes notice and uses his vast wealth to buy Medici and his troupe to secure the flying elephant for his own personal gain. His goal is the have the beautiful Collette (Eva Green) ride Dumbo to thrill his massive crowds, and use the new attraction to secure funding from J. Griffin Remington (Alan Arkin) to expand his empire.
If none of this sounds familiar to long-time fans of Dumbo, you are not alone. Gone are the talking mouse, Timothy, and the jazz-loving crows, leaving this film as a human-led affair. And while the script by Ehren Kruger does tend to capture the wholesome family entertainment that Disney was hoping, fans of the animated Dumbo might be disappointed. The script, and by proxy, the story of Dumbo, is stripped of anything that might be considered offensive, like the crows, and the alcohol scene that leads to the parade of the pink elephants, one of the most iconic sequences in Disney animated history. Burton still finds a unique way to include the pink elephants to create arguably the best scene in this film, but the basis of the huge number is drastically different.
The animation of Dumbo as a character is clearly one of the high points of the film, as the pachyderm’s huge blue eyes convey emotion better than most of the human cast. The trials and tribulations of Holt and his family are generic at best, and the main attraction of the film — the actual flying elephant — often takes a backseat to Milly and her wish to be a scientist and Holt and his struggles with being left with one arm. It was nice to see Micheal Keaton and Danny Devito together again, though, as Batman Returns is a longtime favorite film.
In many ways, Dumbo is Tim Burton at his most toothless. There is no dark undertone and none of the scenes have his patented acerbic touch. This is a by-the-numbers Disney affair; something that the whole family can and will enjoy, even though it eschews most of the heart that the original film had so Kruger and Burton can take cheap potshots at corporate Disney itself. Keaton’s Vandervere is Walt Disney in all but name — and he’s the villain in this film. Go figure.
Even without that non-subtle biting of the hand that feeds, Dumbo is unremarkable in almost every other way, and that makes it a good family film with something for everyone — as long as you aren’t looking to be wowed with something you’ve never seen before. To call it safe is an understatement, but at the very least, I can see how and why this is the direction that Disney and Burton and Kruger took. I just hope this unimaginative film isn’t a precursor to the more anticipated live action films, like Aladdin and Lion King, because if those films get screwed up, fans will grab their pitchforks and take it to Bob Iger and company in ways that racist crows and drunk elephants could never imagine.
Dumbo is rated PG and is in theaters on March 29.
