Summary
Look out! Look out! Remakes on parade. Here they come Hippety hoppety! They’re here and there are remakes everywhere!
A gritty reboot of Dumbo isn’t necessarily something the world has been crying out for. While the live action remakes continue to roll out like so many pink elephants on parade, the tale of the elephant who could fly is the perhaps the most unlikely. With Tim Burton at the helm, it’s a darker childhood fantasy that never quite decides who its audience is.
The original Dumbo, released by Walt Disney in 1941, clocked in at a little over an hour. Expanded from being a short film at the development stage, it remains an exemplar of mid-length animated storytelling about elephants who can fly. Made with utter simplicity to recoup the financial losses of Fantasia, its classic songs “Baby Mine” and “When I See an Elephant Fly” continue to appear in Disney media to this day. Of course, modern Disney doesn’t quite have the same money problems as a studio during wartime, and Burton’s DUMBO is a much larger affair.
Almost doubling the length of the original, writer Ehren Kruger (Transformers: Age of Extinction, Ghost in the Shell) shifts the focus away from the baby elephant and his rodent companion and instead focuses on the humans. Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns from war with a missing arm, surprising his children Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins). With his wife dead of influenza, Holt struggles to find his place at the Medici Bros. Circus (run by Danny DeVito as a kind of analogue for Timothy Q. Mouse). At least until he is put in charge of a newborn baby elephant with remarkable abilities.
The dramatic shift for the new DUMBO comes in the second half of the film, picking up (more or less) where the original narrative left off. Dumbo’s success catches the attention of V. A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), an entrepreneurial figure who runs a destination carnival called Dreamland, kind of a cross between Disneyland and Coney Island on crack. As a result, the central tension of the film doesn’t come necessarily from whether Dumbo can fly but rather whether the little guy can take down the giant corporation buying out smaller companies. (It’s an odd release in a month when Disney just devoured Fox for over $70 billion).
At its core DUMBO is still a film about self-belief, yet by shifting the focus away from the anthropomorphic animals and to Holt’s family it becomes a redemption story for the freaks and geeks on the fringes. This is Burton’s most comfortable territory, from Parker as the wide-eyed goth girl to a reunion of Batman Returns rivals Keaton and DeVito on screen.
In fact, much of the film’s climax takes place in the kind of exaggerated CG landscape that wouldn’t be out of place in Burton’s Gotham. While he eschews most of the songs – save for a few hummed bars and two separate versions of “Baby Mine” – Burton can’t resist marching a series of pink elephants across the screen, albeit as lovingly rendered bubble art. There are modern pop culture references too, including a cameo from WWE’s Vince McMahon declaring “Let’s get ready to Dumboooo” (twice).
In some ways, the original Dumbo has become one of Disney’s more uncomfortable narratives, from the tragedy of animals in captivity to the debates on the depiction of race. With remakes of Aladdin and The Lion King both on their way this year, and a litany of others in the coming years, it’s at least encouraging that Disney is willing to take their classics into places they previously wouldn’t dare. Or like the best of circus tricks, it could be all smoke and mirrors.
2019 | US | DIR: Tim Burton | WRITER: Ehren Kruger (based on Disney’s Dumbo) | CAST: Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Eva Green, Nico Parker, Finley Hobbins, Alan Arkin | RUNNING TIME: 112 minutes | DISTRIBUTOR: Disney (AUS) | RELEASE DATE: 28 March 2019 (AUS)
