Dumbo (2019)
Directed by Tim Burton
A young elephant, whose oversized ears enable him to fly, helps save a struggling circus, but when the circus plans a new venture, Dumbo and his friends discover dark secrets beneath its shiny veneer.
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There’s no inspiration from gothic art, another major influence, or even any attempt to borrow from Tod Browning’s Freaks , which seems like the best point of reference for this tale.
Burton’s inspiration for the circus is as much Tod Browning’s horror classic Freaks as the Disney original.
That’s why “Ed Wood” was a cracked masterpiece, why “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands” are still dark delights, why “Batman,” driven by Jack Nicholson’s palm-buzzer bravura, left you jazzed while “Batman Returns,” with its conceptual gallery of rogues, didn’t, and why “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” was a delirious remake and “Planet of the Apes” was a dud.
In this millennium, however, Burton has hawked both this sensibility and his trademark carnival-esque aesthetic into a string of half-cooked studio remakes: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Planet of the Apes, Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows and, now, Disney’s Dumbo.
He let Johnny Depp do a surely regrettable Michael Jackson impression in 2005’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and had NRA president Charlton Heston, playing a chimp, give a campy speech about how awesome guns are in 2001’s “Planet of the Apes.”
I’m probably one of seven people who actually dug the 2001 version of “Planet of the Apes,” and while his “Sweeney Todd” lacked a strong vocal lead, I still found it interesting; likewise for “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” which managed to capture the imagination of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s novel.
Burton has more on his mind than just elephants, and it’s a welcome return to the cohesive color of Batman and Big Fish (and the mania of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ) when he finally takes his shot.
Burton, whose last union with Disney resulted in an explicable billion dollar success (2010’s Alice in Wonderland ), hasn’t been on the most consistent of runs lately, but he proves himself an inspired choice here by simultaneously grounding the film in a somber post-WWI setting whilst injecting his usual flare for theatrics; the visuals and a gloriously camp turn from Michael Keaton reminding us throughout.
Of course, this all started with the unexpected runaway success of Tim Burton‘s Alice in Wonderland , a strange, candy-colored retelling that made obnoxious use of both Johnny Depp and 3D, but whose inflated 3D prices helped make it a box office smash.
Take something about the original, whether it’s the characters, where the narrative is focused, or even just translating the original directly, and re-examine it with a fresh perspective; it started with Burton’s own Alice In Wonderland and it persists to this day.
As soon as a CGI train, billowing CGI smoke, kicking up CGI dust, and sporting a fake-looking engine grill shaped to evoke Alice in Wonderland ’s Cheshire Cat barrels into this cartoonish, mostly CGI world, Dumbo is in trouble.
It was Tim Burton’s dreadful, garish, and bafflingly profitable live-action retooling of Alice in Wonderland that helped kick off the Disney-remake craze nearly a decade ago, so it’s understandable to expect the worst from Dumbo.
That’s why “Ed Wood” was a cracked masterpiece, why “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands” are still dark delights, why “Batman,” driven by Jack Nicholson’s palm-buzzer bravura, left you jazzed while “Batman Returns,” with its conceptual gallery of rogues, didn’t, and why “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” was a delirious remake and “Planet of the Apes” was a dud.
It can easily be viewed that way, but mostly, it’s just the same distrust of authority theme that’s a regular fixture of Burton’s work, aided by delightfully hammy performances from his former Batman Returns stars.
He is shown as an entrepreneur and showman who buys out the circus owned by Danny De Vito’s Max Medici (it’s like the Batman Returns reunion we never realised we needed), absorbing the company and its properties into a larger fold, which includes a gigantic theme park where “the impossible is possible”.
The obviously villainous Vandevere proposes a partnership with Max (and we’re reminded that DeVito was the Penguin to Keaton’s Dark Knight in Batman Returns ), and then we cut to the Medici gang working at Vandevere’s FX amusement park as everyone waits for Dumbo to soar.
Still, for the few and the proud that count 1992’s Batman Returns as one of their favorite all-time superhero flicks, it is thrilling to see Burton, Keaton, DeVito and composer Danny Elfman back in the same sandbox together, with each of them having a blast.
When Keaton and DeVito share the screen in an unlikely Batman Returns reunion, it’s a hoot.
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Directed by idiosyncratic madman Tim Burton and written by Ehren Kruger ( The Ring , Ghost in the Shell ), this update wears its larger-than-life heart on its sleeve and is singularly composed to enthrall children with its sense of magical wonderment.
The new version, directed by Tim Burton and written by Ehren Kruger (credits include three Transformers movies, The Ring and Ghost in the Shell), clocks in at almost two hours and puts the human characters upfront.
The script for 2019’s Dumbo from Ehren Kruger ( Ghost In the Shell ) not only shifts the focus away from the wonderful Dumbo and onto the humans who are caring for the elephant, but also expands the tale into a larger one of self-love and the importance of family.
El guion, firmado por Ehren Kruger (quien escribió las películas de Transformers y, más recientemente, el inerte remake de Ghost in the Shell ), no agrega una pizca de profundidad a sus personajes, que tienen una presencia casi anecdótica, con la excepción de Eva Green que deslumbra cuando entra en cada escena, aunque la nueva musa del director está siendo gastada al igual que Depp en su momento.
In their place, Burton and scripter Ehren Kruger (whose credits range from the underrated pair Arlington Road and Ghost in the Shell to the awfulness of The Brothers Grimm and three — count ‘em, three — Transformers flicks) decided that they should instead focus on the human characters, because Lord knows that’s what people really want to see when they attend a movie ostensibly about a flying elephant.
Director Tim Burton (Sweeney Todd) uses his gothic style to darken the mood and screenwriter Ehren Kruger (Ghost in the Shell) takes the narrative into unfamiliar places in comparison to the cartoon, but when the titular pachyderm is not front and center, Dumbo feels like it’s gliding, not soaring.
The 2019 live-action version of “Dumbo” is as though Ehren Kruger watched the original Disney film, and instead of being inspired by the economy of storytelling in the animated classic, the “Transformers: Age of Extinction” screenwriter came away thinking nothing had happened.
Tim Burton and Screenwriter Ehren Kruger, who penned the catastrophic “Transformers: Age of Extinction,” have decided to turn “Dumbo,” an animated classic which ran for just 64-minutes, into a two-hour movie.