Disney seems to have made it a habit to take some of their classic films and resell them to their fans with diminishing results, and the most recent one to be next in the demonstration line is Dumbo. Acting as a remake of the 1941 animated Disney movie, Dumbo does have its fan and is perfectly good in its own right, but it doesn’t seem like one of Disney’s all-time classics, so it’s definitely bizarre to see them choose it as one to remake. Regardless of popularity, it’s safe to say that original is going to look a whole lot better now after this one graced the theatres in 2019.  In 1919 Florida, equestrian performer, and World War I amputee Holt Farrier (played by Colin Pharrell) returns home to his two children, Milly, and Joe (played by Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins) and goes to his previous employer, the Medici Brothers’ Circus run by Max Medici (played by Danny DeVito) in order to get work for his family now that his wife has passed away. Being hired as a caretaker of the circus’ pregnant elephant, she gives birth to a healthy baby elephant with extremely large ears. Deemed a freak and mockingly titled Dumbo, the kids, who have formed a connection with Dumbo after his mother was taken away from him, soon discover that he can use his ears to fly, which wows the audience and brings extreme praise to the once-struggling circus and puts them on the map. That praise comes with a price though when a rich tycoon owner of the amusement park, Dreamland, named V.A. Vandevere (played by Michael Keaton) and his lady assistant Colette (played by Eva Green) discover Dumbo’s talent and brings him and the circus to their Bohemian attraction, not realizing Keaton plans to use Dumbo for his own benefits. Directed by Tim Burton, the film managed to do decently at the box office, but received mixed reception from critics, which is honestly quite considering how messy this movie is. With a cartoonish delivery and tone even stronger than its original counterpart, forgettable characters that waste great actors, and a constant need to rush past genuine heartfelt moments to give focus to pointless lazy cliches, it fails as both an authentic remake and as a stand-alone movie. Though at least featuring a visual eye in some moments, a good majority of this film doesn’t have much you can’t get from the original.

While this in many ways is a sad statement in itself, but this film deserves credit for at least being its own creation and not just a shot-for-shot remake of the original. It would’ve been quite hard to replicate the original format and pace of the animated film as it goes for a more experience-over-narrative kind of direction, so there’s room to change things up and include new components while sticking to the main crux of the tale. The problem comes from the fact that despite there being a decent amount of new stuff added to this film, a lot of it is either cliched, uninspired, or just incredibly boring. Whenever they do try to replicate a scene, its rushed by so quickly that it never leaves any impression and the new scenes that are included are actually not bad on paper, but are filmed, written, and directed in such a manner that they never feel like they add much to the story of Dumbo, instead just feeling like a new coat of paint underneath a stale rusty car. The pace of the film allows little time for the solid scenes to breath and gives a lot of attention to aspects of the story that nobody cares about, made even worse now that the leading perspective here against the original story. The script for this film was written by Ehren Kruger, who helped write movies like Scream 3, Reindeer Games, The Ring Two, and three of the Michael Bay Transformer movies, which is a pretty good indication of how his movies usually flow. It’s so frustrating to see some decent ideas come out from this delivery being suffocated by very stale and formulaic cliches, pushing an animated film that was emotionally engaging and even uncomfortably trippy in parts, and turns into any other standard ”ugly duckling” story. The only time where things get a bit more exciting and even a little creative in terms of its content is during the climax, where actually getting to see Dumbo fly around a burning-down theme park is a pretty cool visual, but even then, it took a long time to get to that point. With Tim Burton at the helm, it does explain some of its poor quality as he has fallen off a bit in recent years, but he actually seems like a good choice for this story as he’s always been fond of plots about outcasted characters within an oddball reality (which is exactly what Dumbo is). There are a few visuals and even ideas that feel like they would’ve really worked within this story (Dumbo and Colin Farrell’s character sharing a feeling of embarrassment over an abnormality to their bodies is a great idea that is never explored), but it just doesn’t work as an overall package.

With a bland story and script come bland characters, and you’ve got a cattle call of all the typical roles you’d expect from this kind of story, with the people on the good side being quirky yet endearing and have the proper family spirit, and those on the bad side are corrupt and only care about the money. The fact that Dumbo isn’t made the character of focus anymore isn’t too much of an issue, as he always was kind of the observer rather than an active participant in the narrative, and he is still made to be very cute, expressive and features some relatively decent effects that, while not real looking, do effectively bring the image of an elephant with giant eyes that can fly onto the big screen. But now that the movie has no talking animals and the real main characters have to now be human, this is where things start to fall apart. Everybody’s acting in this movie just feels off in a lot of ways, seemingly having very little direction from Burton who feels very un-intrusive in a lot of these scenes. He’s always been known for getting unique looking and sounding people to star in his films, and since the story is based around a circus, it allows for those kind of people to shine, but they aren’t in a very memorable way and the safest of the leads really takes over a good chunk of the film. One of the biggest criticism this film received was for the terrible acting from two leading kids, and even though they are only children with limited experience who seemed to be given no solid direction, it’s really hard to defend them because they are distractingly flat and lifeless in this. While Finley Hobbins is mainly just forgettable due to barely having any lines, Nico Parker is given a lot more attention and is truly awful and barely sounds like she cares at all. With that said, it’s not like the adults are that much better. Colin Pharrell is just stuck with a silly accent, Danny DeVito handles the serious stuff okay, but he isn’t given too much else to work with, and Michael Keaton is just a joke in this picture, being stuck with a bland outdated character, an incredibly odd accent that he just can’t pull off at all, and is written in such a generic way that his whole purpose of being evil feels like the only reason he does some stupid stuff at the end that ruins his plan (keeping Dumbo and his mother separate is completely pointless and is only done to make him look evil), he is easily the worst part of this film. The only actor that seems to get through her parts okay is Eva Green as the trapeze artists. Even though she doesn’t have much character or screen time, she carries her scenes with enough conviction to make her a memorable face.

One of the few redeeming elements of the film is in its production value which does bring a unique feel to the atmosphere of the picture, but even that comes with its own form of hurdles. On the one hand, the movie is strangely lacking in a lot of color, with a lot of the locations seen especially during the latter half of the story being very bleached out and minimal in its variety. During the first act when the characters are outside in the fields, it has a decent splash of color and there are even a few nice shots by Ben Davis that are well framed and can even be a little creative at times, but for the most part, the production design by Rick Heinrichs looks kinda washed out and grey in tone. The amusement park is clearly supposed to be a riff on Disneyland (which is weird considering Disney is making this movie), but it only really works for contrast, and it starts to become a pretty boring place to be around after a while. It does seem to have a very Burton-esque quality to its presentation, with its color choices and visual designs have more metaphoric meaning as opposed to active reasoning, and while it is nowhere near as visually pleasing as some of his other work and doesn’t fully work as a whole, you can see an idea in here that has sprinkles of something pleasant. The effects overall are a bit hit-or-miss with most looking relatively fake, but never to the point of being distracting and on occasion, they provide for some pleasing eye-candy.  The Pink Elephant scene, though nowhere near as trippy and imaginative as the original, does still have some pleasing imagery and fun colors to look at.  The music by Danny Elfman feels a bit too much like every other score that he’s produced in the last few years (which has been something that he’s struggled with a lot in his recent projects) but an acoustic version of Baby Mine, though connected to a rushed scene, does sound quite nice and is very well sung.

Dumbo just feels like another excuse for Disney to retell one of their stories without any effort or any understanding of what made the original work years ago. Though not as bad as some of the other Disney remakes as it at least tries to be its own thing, the movie feels too goofy and cartoony to be taken seriously, and yet the lack of direction and clever writing doesn’t make it work on a serious level either. At times the visuals can be nice, the music is repetitive but pleasant to listen too, the quiet moments are atmospheric enough and once and a while there is either a cute or emotional moment that works okay, but aside from that, it doesn’t really work as a whole with a cliched story, too many boring characters, bland environments, and a rushed pacing, which ruins the magic the audience should feel. This movie seems to have missed its magic feather and quickly and quietly sunk.

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