The original Dumbo is a 64-minute animated feature that is vaguely about nothing, but tiptoes around the story of a freakish elephant baby who is separated from his mother, and bullied just to inevitably get his redemption when he learns that he can fly. The 2019 film manages to alter the storyline and stretch the film to almost 2 hours long. At 64 minutes, the original film felt like it was dragging but at 2 hours, the 2019 adaptation felt never-ending.
Tim Burton’s live-action adaptation takes us a drastically different from the original, by introducing a human family, and it brings the viewer inside the heart of the circus and its performers. Some could argue that if this live-action movie was handled in the same The Jungle Book (2016) or Beauty and The Beast (2017) were, it could have been better. Having the animals talk, like they did in the original movie, could have been more compelling than not having them talk at all.
Granted, it also could have ended up being a disaster. Instead of talking animals, the movie introduces uses this new family, their backstory and their children to move the story along — but it didn’t quite work. There’s no emotional tie between the viewer and the family. There are attempts, but they they fall short. For instance, the movie starts off by telling the audience that the children’s mother had passed away while the father (Colin Farrell) was at war. This doesn’t have an impact due to the emotionless acting from the children and the father. After that storyline though there’s no reason for a viewer to have any emotional attachment to this family.
Dumbo himself, is an odd mixture of a cute and terrifying CGI mess. He eventually gets separated from his mother, as in the original film, but instead of being lonely for the rest of the movie, the two children, Millie and Joe Farrier (Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins). They keep him company and train him how to fly which allows him to become the main act of the circus.
The movie itself doesn’t show too many of the training scenes between Dumbo and the children, which could have been super interesting to watch, but instead they eventually show the tricks that Dumbo has learned. The tricks included Dumbo lifting his right ear, left ear, and then taking off using the feather. Dumbo becoming the main act of the circus for the main plotline of the movie is interesting because in the original they didn’t show Dumbo fly until the very end of the film. Here the circus utilizes Dumbo to gain fame and money.
Within this movie, Dumbo can only fly when he has a feather, similar to the original. Towards the end of the movie, Dumbo is forced to fly without the feather. In order to come to this conclusion, Millie has a long discussion with him basically about not needing material objects to believe in yourself. The sentiment was touching but also weird to think that Dumbo, the baby elephant, understands the deep metaphor that the daughter was presenting him with. In the original, Dumbo was falling to his death and had to fly to save himself, which made way more sense.
There’s a lot that happening in this movie, but yet it was missing so much. And what it’s missing is logical character development. There’s so much more they could’ve done with Mille, as for her brother — it’s never clear he’s even there. A few characters have drastic shifts in their personality but for no noticeable reason. There’s a random romance that’s developed between two circus members who do not interact in the movie will the end. The majority of the members of the circus are underdeveloped. There’s one scene where they show the circus acts working together, which was fun to watch, but scenes like this are few and far between.
Disney’s Dumbo is filled with numerous callback to the original film and this was very enjoyable. Luckily, the racist crows from the original movie were left out of this version, which was the best decision Disney could have made for this movie. However, there’s so much that could’ve been done better — from the acting to directing to the CGI.
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