Mark Reviews Movies: DUMBO (2019)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 28, 2019

One of the simplest of the Disney animated features, the 1941 Dumbo is incredibly short (running just over an hour), very sad, vibrantly colorful, and unexpectedly imaginative. It does a lot with quite a little, in other words, tapping into the simplicity and innocence of a children's book. Early into this substantially longer adaptation of Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl's original story, we know that screenwriter Ehren Kruger and director Tim Burton's new version of the tale will be an entirely different entity.

First of all, Dumbo, the most recent of Disney's trend of turning their animated classics into live-action movies, isn't really about the eponymous elephant. The gentle pachyderm with big, floppy ears and bright, blue eyes and an endearing squeak is central to the story, of course, but Kruger and Burton have turned this into a decidedly human affair.

Some may shout accusations of a kind of blasphemy for this decision, since the animated film barely cared about the presence of its human characters, who appeared mostly in shadow, obscured, as caricatures, or so briefly that their insignificance was patently clear. The elephants mattered the most, as did the other animals of the circus and a show business-minded rodent, dressed up like a ringmaster.

Instead, Burton continues his own trend—of finding and sympathizing with those who are considered society's outsiders and outcasts. The baby elephant, mocked and shunned for his oversized ears, provides the thematic backbone for this particular variation of the director's own narrative tendencies. Dumbo matters in this version, of course, but so, too, do a wounded war veteran, a diminutive ringmaster, a young girl who loves science more than show business, and an entire sideshow's worth of performers in a traveling circus. The animals, save for Dumbo and his mother, become background players or visual references here.

On a narrative level, Kruger has both altered and expanded upon the original film. There's plenty of room for that, since the 1941 film barely had enough plot to fill an hour. Recall the extended scenes of clown gags and the musical numbers, including the pre-psychedelic, drunken-dream sequence involving a bunch of hollow-eyed pink elephants. Here, there's a variation of that scene, which becomes a visual metaphor for the film's major theme of all-consuming and destructive greed, as well as a joke that a performer should keep booze away from the baby.

The actual story of the original fills about as much time in this version. It gets to the emotional climax of the first film, in which the elephant's mother rocks her baby in its trunk while she or some voice from the heavens sings a heartrending lullaby, very early. The actual climax of the story, in which Dumbo shows off his flying abilities to a shocked and captivated audience, is really just the beginning of this version.

The new characters include Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), a circus performer who has returned home from the Great War and has lost one of his arms in combat, and his two children, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins). While their father was away, the children's mother died during a flu epidemic, and Holt returns to a traveling circus that has come upon hard times. Max Medici (Danny DeVito), the owner of the enterprise, has put all of his eggs in one basket—a pregnant Asian elephant named Mrs. Jumbo. Surely, a baby elephant will gain publicity and sell tickets.

The rest of the first act will be familiar to anyone who knows the animated version. The new baby, nicknamed Dumbo after an unfortunate first appearance in a circus act, becomes a laughingstock, and his mother is kept in solitary confinement after coming to her baby's defense (The resulting chaos results in the accidental death of an abusive elephant tamer—just in case one was wondering if Burton goes a little darker in his adaptation). Instead of a mouse, the kids keep Dumbo company, discover that this particular elephant can fly (sneezing after inhaling a feather, being lifted off the ground, and gently falling to the ground by flapping its ears), and transform the pachyderm into the circus' main attraction.

This new version is certainly darker, in terms of tone and action and visuals, but when the film acts as a human-centric remake of the original, it remains just as sweet and, at times, almost as inspired as its predecessor. Dumbo, now a computer-generated character, isn't as anthropomorphized as he was in hand-drawn form, but the elephant is still as sympathetic, with its eyes watering with melancholy and humiliated tears. When the creature takes flight, there's a cathartic joy to seeing the outcast elephant become much more than a joke.

The rest of this version's story, in which Dumbo becomes the main attraction at a theme park run by a diabolical mogul (played by Michael Keaton), is quite, well, different—and rather ambitious, too. It's almost as if the filmmakers are satirizing their own efforts—or, at least, the very concept of transforming something as purely magical as Dumbo into a cynically commercialized product. It's subversive, to say the least, targeting not just itself but also the corporate mentality that would feel the need to enhance what is already special on its own—all the while chewing up and spitting out the people who brought the idea of a flying elephant to life in the first place.

Is it possible for the film to simultaneously be a re-imagining of a beloved story and a condemnation of that practice? Dumbo makes a convincing case that such a two-faced approach is possible, as long as, in this case, the filmmakers actually believe in the simple magic of a flying elephant.

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