{"id":7162,"date":"2019-03-27T13:20:02","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T17:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=7162"},"modified":"2019-03-27T13:22:14","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T17:22:14","slug":"review-dumbo-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=7162","title":{"rendered":"Review: DUMBO (2019)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Appealing only to the youngest viewers, \u201cDumbo\u201d will not enchant the rest of us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Disney\u2019s live-action versions of their animated classics continues to attack cinemas this weekend. With the Tim Burton directed \u201cDumbo,\u201d we with another crack at the story originally conceived on Roll-A-Book by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl. Later converted from that format to a 36-page illustrated book entitled \u201cDumbo the Flying Elephant,\u201d Disney adapted it into a beloved animated 64-minute movie back in 1941. Imagine a 64-minute feature film today? By comparison, Burton\u2019s live-action movie runs a breezy 112 minutes.

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Colin Farrell plays a former circus star who now manages the elephants.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For those of you who grew up fondly remembering \u201cDumbo\u201d and shedding tears, take heart, this new movie won\u2019t tarnish those memories. Unfortunately, it won\u2019t create new ones either. Burton\u2019s bland handling of the material marks a new low for the director, who has always managed to bring a sense of wonder to anything he touches. Sadly, \u201cDumbo (2019)\u201d is not magical.

When Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns home from World War I, he\u2019s greeted by his two children, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins). His wife has passed away, and Holt, a one-time horse-riding circus star, has lost his arm in battle. After a moment of adjustment, the kids hug their father, who seems more interested in getting back on a horse than in consoling his two little ones, who have lost their mother and have to deal with an injured father.

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Dumbo is taken in by the traveling circus family.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Farriers live with a traveling circus. Visiting towns across the United States by rail, we get a brief sequence that shows the company playing towns from Florida to Missouri. The shame is that we aren\u2019t given examples of those stops that show-off and celebrate circus life, even a highly stylized one. Holt and his wife had an act involving horses. But in his absence, the owner of the company, Max Medici (Danny DeVito), sold the horses to pay bills. The circus has fallen on hard times, and Max has to find a new act to save the business.

Gambling on elephants, Max purchases a pregnant elephant. His hope is that a baby elephant might be an attraction. But when the baby is born, it\u2019s deformed, or, at least, Max thinks so. The baby\u2019s ears are abnormally large. How can he market this strange beast?

Everything about the setup is suspect. Like most of Burton\u2019s work, the world inhabited by the characters is fantastical, a wondrous parallel universe. It\u2019s best to just go with the fantasy aspects of the environment. But this can only go so far.

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Michael Keaton plays the scheming villain V. A. Vandevere.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Once Dumbo\u2019s special gift, that of flight, is revealed, he gains the attention of the unscrupulous entertainment promoter V. A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton, with an intentionally bad toupee). He visits the traveling circus and convinces Max to relocate his group to Coney Island, where they will have a new home. Vandevere\u2019s reasoning is, I suppose, that in order to get the best act, he\u2019ll have to take all of them. It\u2019s best not to think too hard about it, but there are far too many holes in the plan.

So, in no time, the cast is transported to a new circus, an amazing amusement park named Dreamland. And the hope is that Dumbo will be the star performer. Vandevere wants his French acrobat companion, Colette Marchant (Eva Green), to ride Dumbo, as he flies over the crowd. Needless to say things don\u2019t go as planned.

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Eva Green plays a French acrobat, who tries to riding Dumbo.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The great misstep in Burton\u2019s \u201cDumbo\u201d is in placing the focus on the humans and not on the animals. Students of the 1941 film know that the story is chiefly told through talking animals. In Burton\u2019s movie, an elephant can fly, but none of the animals say a word. In fairness, Dumbo does not speak in the 1941 film, but those around him do, including other elephants and particularly Timothy Q. Mouse (voiced by Edward Brophy).

There are homages to the animated classic throughout the new movie, with Milly, a scientist-in-training, keeping a collection of mice. Remember that Timothy Q. Mouse was a critical character in the 1941 version, who eventually becomes Dumbo\u2019s manager. Given the success of 2016\u2019s \u201cThe Jungle Book\u201d in which animals were convincingly given voices in an otherwise live-action production (a unique and marvelous hybrid), one wonders why this film decided to keep the animals silent?

While there are no stork deliveries or talking crows, there is a pink elephant scene in this new film. However, this potentially lovely moment doesn\u2019t have any particular connection to the story. It\u2019s a throwaway reference. In 1941, Timothy and Dumbo get accidentally drunk and imagine seeing pink elephants, which is an old reference going on a drunken bender.

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Dumbo’s lovable personality isn’t enough to overcome the film’s short-comings.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But perhaps the biggest disappointment in this version is that key human characters act in cartoonish and frustrating ways. Burton regular, and great comic actor, Michael Keaton is given the thankless task of playing the film\u2019s heavy. It\u2019s a poorly conceived and written role. His weird wig and uneven accent make him more laughable than mysterious. And Keaton, who should have won the Oscar for 2014\u2019s \u201cBirdman,\u201d could have chewed up all the scenery required, providing menace like he did so effectively in \u201cSpider-Man: Homecoming.\u201d But like everything in this film, no time is taken to develop the backstory or make us appreciate anything credibly.

\u201cDumbo (2019)\u201d adopts an unsophisticated narrative that fails to promote the important, self-reliant moral that made the 1941 adaptation a classic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To read more about the original story of \u201cDumbo,\u201d read a blog entry by Jim Korkis on JimHillmedia.com: http:\/\/jimhillmedia.com\/alumni1\/b\/wade_sampson\/archive\/2004\/12\/27\/the-original-story-of-dumbo.aspx<\/strong><\/em>

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Tim Burton’s new version of the classic Disney property lacks magic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[1021,1376,294,1321,1372,1375,1371,1373,1374,1370],"class_list":["post-7162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-colin-farrell","tag-danny-devito","tag-disney","tag-dumbo","tag-eva-green","tag-finley-hobbins","tag-live-action","tag-michael-keaton","tag-nico-parker","tag-tim-burton","no-thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7162"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7162\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7171,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7162\/revisions\/7171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}