Review: Tim Burton’s Dumbo Gives Its Corporate Overlord What It Mostly Wants

Author: Keith Watson / Source: slantmagazine.com

The last time Tim Burton teamed up with Disney to reimagine one of the studio’s animated classics as a CGI-laden live-action spectacle, the result was Alice in Wonderland, a garish exhibition of Burton’s worst impulses, right down to Johnny Depp’s nauseatingly over-the-top mugging.

Now, Disney has handed Burton the keys to one of its sweetest and most peculiar properties, Dumbo, the fable-like tale of a downtrodden little circus elephant with big, funny ears who learns how to fly. But this time around, for good and ill, the corporate powers that be appear to have kept Burton on a much shorter leash.

Burton’s version isn’t only one of the most conventional works of his career, it’s also a much safer, blander film than the original, which, after all, included a surrealistic dream sequence and a song-and-dance number featuring crows as thinly veiled African-American stereotypes. While Burton’s film understandably jettisons the latter of these scenes completely, its charming but all-too-brief allusion to the former speaks to the film’s fundamentally restricted ambitions. In 1941, Disney may have felt comfortable giving its audience five minutes of whacked-out proto-psychedelic weirdness in a film that barely topped 60 minutes, Burton’s film offers only a short scene of circus performers blowing bubbles that look like pink elephants—just enough to remind us of the original while doing nothing to recapture its spirit.

Bizarrely, Burton’s film turns the focus away from Dumbo himself and toward a group of human characters whose arcs are perfunctory to the point of distraction. The film’s ostensible protagonist is Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), a WWII veteran with a missing arm who rejoins his job at the low-rent traveling Medici Bros. Circus after being discharged. He also reunites with his son and daughter, Joe (Finley Hobbins) and Milly (Nico Parker), two tykes who are, like their…

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