And who cares if Dumbo can carry the trapeze artiste on his back? Whether Dumbo himself cares is open to debate. The impresario believes that if Dumbo can be trained to carry a French trapeze artiste (Green) through the air, he will be able to prise some funds out of a banker (Alan Arkin) – because apparently nobody would invest in a flying elephant on its own.īut, really, who cares if the impresario gets some extra cash? His theme park seems to be a phenomenal money-spinner as it is. What happens is that after Dumbo learns to fly, a PT Barnum-alike impresario (Keaton) invites Max and his troupe to live and work in Dreamland, a lavish, anachronistic New York theme park which – strangely for a Disney film – appears to be a nightmarish parody of Disneyland. The second half of the film has a different cruel hired hand who mistreats the elephants. The first half of the film has a cruel hired hand who mistreats the elephants. The second half of the film has a different circus owner who hopes that Dumbo will make him rich. ![]() The first half of the film has a circus owner who hopes that Dumbo will make him rich. But each time, we’re reminded of how dull and repetitive the plotting is. Beforehand, the best that Burton and Kruger can come up with is not one, not two, but three sequences in which Dumbo perches on a high platform, plunges towards the ground, and then at the last second pulling up and zooming around the big top in triumph.Įach time, we’re meant to be relieved when he doesn’t hit terra firma with a splat. In the final scene, the young elephant’s aerobatics are as joyous as you might expect. But even this opportunity for gravity-defying frolics is wasted. In the remake, he takes to the air after about half an hour. In the original cartoon, Dumbo doesn’t fly until the last few minutes. But it’s just one of many instances in which the ramshackle story keeps going only because the characters behave in the most stupid and implausible way they can.Įhren Kruger’s screenplay does make one shrewd change, however. ![]() You might assume that Max would be delighted to have such a rare and undeniably cute specimen on his hands, but instead he complains that nobody will pay to see a baby elephant with ears the size of bedsheets. But when the calf is born, its ears are bigger than the rest of it. He has just bought a heavily pregnant elephant, and, he says, her baby will be a gold mine. And, anyway, the circus’s scruffy owner, Max (DeVito), has some cheering news. On the other hand, Holt’s children never seem too upset about their mother’s recent death. Yes, like Mary Poppins Returns, Dumbo is one of those Disney children’s films which kill off a woman just so that viewers will sympathise with a man. While he was away, his left arm was amputated, and if that weren’t grim enough, his wife was killed in an influenza outbreak, leaving him to take care of his daughter (Nico Parker) and son (Finley Hobbins). One of these is Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), a Kentucky stunt rider who returns to a dilapidated travelling circus from the battlefields of World War One. ![]() Does The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part match the original?īurton has also removed the talking animals who were in the cartoon and replaced them with a crowd of largely miserable humans. Presumably he decided that a film about a flying baby elephant was no laughing matter. Burton’s idea of a joke is to cast Michael Buffer, the boxing and wrestling announcer, as a ringmaster who drawls, “Let’s get ready for Dumbo!” in place of his catchphrase, “Let’s get ready to rumble!” And for most of the running time, the director doesn’t bother with jokes at all. Instead, it’s a gloomy, unfocused jumbo jumble which puts in numerous pointless references to the cartoon, but which takes out the songs, the energy and most of the fun. With its retro circus setting and with a roll call of fine actors including Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito and Eva Green, Dumbo might well have been one of Disney’s best films – and one of Burton’s best films as well.ĭisappointingly, it’s neither. For another thing, the person in charge of expanding and developing it was Tim Burton, who loves classic animation almost as much as he loves magical tales of persecuted outsiders. For one thing, the original 1941 cartoon was only an hour long, so there was plenty of scope for it to be expanded and developed. Some of us are counting the days until Disney stops churning out live-action / CGI remakes of its cartoons – Aladdin and The Lion King are next – but the live-action Dumbo promised to be something special.
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