Dumbo

Do you believe an elephant can fly? If you didn’t before, here to make the pill easier to swallow is Disney’s Dumbo; the latest live-action remake of a classic animated tale. No stranger to such exercises, Tim Burton helms the piece, assisted by a photorealistic Dumbo and his latest muses, Colin Farrell and Eva Green.

This is Disney’s loosest adaptation of an original animation yet; sweeping the remake part out of the way in the first half hour before moving on to an all-new story – Dumbo’s Adventures in Evil Disneyland. Purchased by Michael Keaton’s sinister entrepreneur, Dumbo is teamed with aerial acrobat Eva Green who is to ride the elephant in flight – because who cares about flying elephants unless there’s a hot, scantily-clad lady flying around upon it? There, she and her fellow circusfolk hatch a plan to free Dumbo and rescue his mother, before Michael Keaton can have her turned into a pair of elephant-skin shoes.

Eva Green flying around the place on a baby elephant is as unnecessary to Dumbo’s act as it is the story, but Burton and screenwriter Ehren Krueger have to pad the tale out somehow, and without the talking animals (Timothy is gone, and there’s no way we were ever getting the crows in 2019), they’re forced to rely upon the human element. Or, in this case, invent one.

Green and Farrell are both fine as the acrobat and the elephant trainer, but the latter’s children don’t work at all, and feel like little more than doe-eyed exposition devices only kept around to motivate Dumbo or move the plot forward. Be thankful for Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito, then, who lend the film some much-needed energy and charm, even in the face of a witless script and dull, inevitable storytelling.

Like Keaton’s evil Disneyland, Dumbo is a cynical, listless operation, manipulating audiences’ nostalgia and love of CGI animals with big blue eyes. Some things do work (most notably Burton’s take on the pink elephants sequence) and the film is visually on point (if lacking in the flair we might once have expected from the director), but it’s a lazy, money-grabbing chore.

You’ll believe that an elephant can fly, but you won’t care.