![]() That sadness quickly gets exploited by V. ![]() DeVito, a Burton regular who has now played three circus ringleaders for the director (if you count the Penguin in Batman Returns, which you should), has all the necessary exuberance, but similarly excels at indicating just the right amount of sadness behind the eyes. Holt is moved to help an animal with a physical deformity, as he’s still getting over the loss of his own arm it’s a clunky storytelling device that Farrell manages to elevate with his practiced soulfulness. In Dumbo, both Holt and Burton himself see a kindred spirit, an oddity who’s initially shunned by the crowds for his freakish appearance but is obviously pure of heart. Still, Burton takes pains to represent the circus the Farriers work for, run by the gregarious Max Medici (Danny DeVito), as a fairly loving community, albeit one whose profit margins have shrunk over the years. Their backstory is a mostly fitting match to both Burton’s aesthetic (the director has always favored grimmer slices of life) and the somber tone of Dumbo’s narrative, which is one of forced separation and loss. ![]() Their mother is recently dead from a bout of influenza, and their father, Holt (Colin Farrell), is a distant, haunted war veteran who lost an arm in battle. The Farriers consist of a budding scientist named Milly (Nico Parker) and her brother, Joe (Finley Hobbins). Ehren Kruger’s script keeps Dumbo as a protagonist without dialogue (though there are plenty of squeaks and trumpets), instead centering the action on a circus family, the Farriers, who take the elephant in after his mother is shipped off for mistakenly attacking someone. Somehow it works.Ī few of the elements missing from the original are welcome cuts (such as the painfully racist chorus of crows) others, such as the drunken “pink elephant” sequence and Dumbo’s anthropomorphic mouse friend, are rather significant things to omit, though they do get brief references. ![]() The movie takes the basic concept of the original-a baby elephant, separated from his mother at the circus, wins her back through the power of flight-but removes many of its iconic elements, replacing them with a more convoluted tale about the dark side of achieving fame and fortune. Today, it’s hard to imagine a time when Disney would have ever worried about budgets Burton’s remake is an extravagant, big-top show starring CGI animals and replete with his typically lush sets and costumes (designed by Rick Heinrichs and Colleen Atwood, respectively). The 1941 animated original, the fourth-ever Disney feature, was a deliberately economical piece of storytelling, a 65-minute fable made in response to budget overreaches of the studio’s previous film, Fantasia. It’s enough to give a jolt of energy to an otherwise standard entry in the Disney live-action-remake assembly line, making Dumbo the first Burton film in more than a decade to be remotely introspective. But in Dumbo, the master of movies about misfits ( Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood) has found a hero worth rallying around: a floppy-lobed circus animal who finds his calling as a superstar when he learns to fly. Perhaps that’s a backhanded compliment, as the director behind masterworks such as Beetlejuice and Batman has mostly churned out forgettable sludge in recent years, including another remake of a Disney animated classic (the risible Alice in Wonderland). Dumbo the big-eared elephant might be Tim Burton’s most complex protagonist in years.
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