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'Dumbo': Turbulent flying elephant ride
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Soaring high: Dumbo comes flying in with a new live action adaptation. (Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group/-)
T
he live-action adaptation of Disney’s 1941 cartoon, Dumbo, gets the little elephant that could up in the air, but it’s a bumpy ride along the way.
Disney seems to be on a roll this year, with remake upon remake raining down on theaters around the world and Dumbo is the first of four planned for release this year.
Like the original cartoon, Dumbo still features the same floppy-eared elephant we all know and love, but with the cast of anthropomorphic animals swapped with regular humans.
Set in 1919, this adaptation follows a struggling traveling circus owned by Max Medici (Danny DeVito) and his troupe of performers. In a bid to get more people to attend, Medici invests in an Asian elephant named Jumbo to be the star of the show.
Those familiar with the original will surely recognize Jumbo as the mother of Dumbo, and this movie stays true to its origins. Sure enough, the baby elephant with the signature oversized ears comes to be known as Dumbo.
As befitting a remake, Dumbo expands on the eponymous elephant’s naming. Rather than having Dumbo named from the beginning, Jumbo Junior earned his name in a circus-related mishap that conveniently defaced the placard with his name on it to spell Dumbo.
However, despite Dumbo being the star of the show in-and-out of the universe, the movie follows several human characters that act as Dumbo’s handlers and companions.
Former cowboy circus star Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns from World War I minus an arm to find that his wife had died in the 1918 influenza pandemic. With his horses sold and no show to go back to, Holt finds himself working as an elephant handler.
Perhaps it is a dose of realism in a movie involving flying elephants, or perhaps it is director Tim Burton’s flair for twisting the innocence, but Dumbo seems depressing from the get-go, with even a (covered) corpse shown on screen. And that’s before going into the ethics of keeping animals for amusement.
Dumbo’s flight eventually catches the attention of V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), an entrepreneur seeking to exploit the elephant’s ability for his own gain through his amusement park Dreamland.
As you can surmise from the setting alone, Dumbo is the kind of Free Willy-esque movie where the message boils down to “caged animals bad, freed animals good”. Like Free Willy, Dumbo also features children as companions to the wild animals, in this case Holt’s children Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins).
It is a simplistic message that these feel-good movies churn out for a dash of happy endings, even with tightening animal welfare laws and the closure of the Ringling Bros. circus in 2017.
Like any other movie out there, Dumbo also has an obligatory semi-romantic subplot represented by Colette Marchant (Eva Green), a French trapeze artist working under Vandevere who is assigned to work with Dumbo, and by extension Holt.
Green, in her third Burton film, is actually French, so you can excuse her French accent, even though it feels tacked-on to emphasize her character’s exoticness.
Another plot-related tidbit that feels forced is Milly’s obsession with everything scientific, which in this climate of women’s movements feels like the filmmakers are gunning for the checklist of politically correct sentiments.
Plot-wise, Dumbo does not offer anything new, and the plot itself only picks up in the latter half of the movie.
The loads and loads of characters, although delivering their best, do nothing to the plot and just seem to be there for flavor and reactions. Only when the movie nears its climax do they become part of the plot, but by then it would have been too late for characterization to do its job.
But Dumbo is a family movie, and those looking for a PG-rated film to keep the kids happy for nearly two hours will get their money’s worth. Depth of plot and character takes a backseat when the main attraction is an elephant flying by flapping its ears.
It’s a bit eerie, but one can draw parallels to how circusgoers can be transfixed to the animals’ antics while ignoring the obvious issue of how the animals are treated to get them to follow the ringmaster.
As a family movie, Dumbo took off successfully, and viewers get a first-class seat to some family fun. (hdt)
INFO BOX:
‘Dumbo’ (Walt Disney Pictures)
Director: Tim Burton
Writer: Ehren Kruger
Cast: Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Eva Green and Alan Arkin
Running time: 112 minutes
