To put it bluntly, 2019 was a very down year for me, personally. A family squabble resulted in my Father and I having to leave our home, I was diagnosed with clinical depression, my Stepfather was stricken with cancer (which he succumbed to in October of 2020) and I had to endure a full scale of bad times that seemed to be relentless in it's drive to make me miserable. There were positives, as I got back into working on my channel after moving and made several LPs and celebrated my 10th Anniversary on YouTube. I got to spend my 25th Birthday in the Walt Disney World Resort and got to do everything I wanted to do, including riding all the new rides (Rise of the Resistance hadn't opened yet) and getting to meet my favorite Disney Princess for the first time in Ariel. Kingdom Hearts III also finally came out in 2019 and I played it, loved it, played it again, hated it, played it a third time and have come to live with it. The new Star Wars Trilogy ended like a wet fart in a funeral home. The MCU came to what should have been it's natural end as Avengers: Endgame wrapped up all of the plotlines of the early MCU and went out on what would have been a high note had Disney not become enamored with all of our money during the pandemic.
Speaking of the Mouse House, they also have been quite a busy company haven't they? Since Beauty and the Beast came out in 2017 (I still hate it with a burning passion), they have released numerous sequels, prequels and remakes to all of their classically loved content. Though I promise I will cover both Christopher Robin and Mary Poppins Returns in their own time, I feel that since my site was built with a firm backbone towards Disney Feature Animation, I should start there with their remakes. And while I have many things to say about Aladdin, The Lion King, Mulan and Cruella, I have to start with the one that nobody remembers, or the one that no one chose to remember because it was basically as forgettable and mediocre a film as it could be.
I don't hate Dumbo. My hate for the next two films will be much more in the norm for how I feel about these films. Dumbo is about as mediocre as it could be. It's not a good film, has numerous contrivances and plot holes and has almost nothing to do with the original film, which in of itself has become noteworthy of late with Disney's censoring of many parts of their older films (including Peter Pan which I am thankful for). Would I call this the most inept of the Disney Remakes? No. Would I call this the most worthless film of the lot? That honor goes to Mulan. But is it worth a watch for you if you have no other shows to catch up on? Also no.
Plot: The film begins with the return to the circus of a man named Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), who has been forced to become an amputee following his service in the First World War. The circus has been having financial troubles due to the outbreak of the Spanish Flu and the Ringmaster (Danny DeVito) reveals he cannot give him his old job back, but can hire him to care for the pregnant Mrs. Jumbo, who gives birth to a baby elephant with abnormally large ears. Though the Ringmaster tries to hide the baby from the public, the crowds soon see him and mock the baby by calling him "Dumbo" and throwing peanuts at him during a performance. Fearful for the wellbeing of her calf, Mrs. Jumbo goes on a rampage and ultimately gets separated from her son after one of the handlers dies due to her onslaught. While comforting the baby, Holt's son and daughter discover that the ears actually are large enough to allow Dumbo to fly.
When Dumbo is initially forced to join a gang of clowns, he shocks and amazes the audiences by flying around the big top, attracting the attention of a greedy businessman named V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton). Wanting to exploit Dumbo's gift for his special amusement park, Vandevere joins forces with the Circus and brings them into his own massive (clearly commentary on Disneyland) amusement park. But when Dumbo starts to defy his orders, Vendevere schemes to euthanize Dumbo's mother and compel him to work directly for him, Holt and his family become determined to reunite Dumbo and his mother and get them to the one place they would be safe from the ambitious entrepreneur: Africa.
What's Wrong?: Have you ever watched one of these films and wondered how they took a movie with a reasonably short run time and turn it into a two hour spectacle? The dreaded "F" word...Filler. This movie is chock full of filler. To be fair, the original film also had a decent amount of filler in it, but at least there it was all to get the film up to reasonably feature length. This movie is just an endless amount of filler. And it unfortunately comes from Disney's most disturbing trend they've had yet with these movies: being {as the political commentators call it} woke. Of course Holt's daughter has to be passionately into science during a time when it was extremely rare for women to have roles outside of the house (Marie Curie was the exception to the rule). It's not like Disney's ever done a film where a bookish and smart girl is misunderstood by the world she lives in...oh wait, they did. Twice!
The biggest culprit of Disney trying to apply a modern twist on ideas from a time nearly 100 years earlier, however, is definitely the circus angle. In recent years, circuses have been shutting down thanks to a very long crusade by animal right's activists who believe the many small and large circuses abuse these animals to make them perform tricks for the audiences amusement. A noble effort to be sure, but this film takes place immediately after World War I. The Star Spangled Banner was still not being sung at all sporting events. Civil Rights were 50 years off. Women had literally just gotten the right to vote. This kind of idealistic thinking would work in a take on Dumbo from the modern age, but not in this particular time frame. It would be like evoking the desire to save the planet from Global Warming when science didn't even seem to be remotely interested in it at the time. It just doesn't make sense for the world of the story that they created. Yes, many of the remaining circuses in the world no longer use formerly wild animals and places like SeaWorld don't make the whale jump around for your amusement anymore. These are great developments for us as people, but would NEVER have flown in the 1910s and 1920s. I
Also, I find it a little insulting to the original film that they completely changed the morals and lessons of the original film. Yes, it's an antiquated message that I even make fun of whenever Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is on the radio in Christmas time (IE, society will mock and deride an abnormality about you until it is beneficial to them), but the moral of the story should at least be in a similar ballpark to the original. The idea that Dumbo and his mother need to go back to Africa isn't a terrible idea, but if this story took place in the same universe as the original film, Africa wouldn't even be on the map for them. Dumbo becomes a celebrity and manages to secure his mother's freedom. That alone is an interesting concept for any kind of film, not just a Disney Film.
The callbacks to this film are also fairly annoying. The Pink Elephants scene from the original, despite having no bearings on the plot outside of getting Dumbo drunk enough to fly into a tree away from the circus, was an artistically insane and wonderful moment to experience. But in this film, it's just a quick little segment with elephants made out of bubbles.
What's Good?: This might be the most palatable Tim Burton movie I've seen since Big Fish. I even forgot that he was the director in some aspects as this film lacks a lot of the generic "Burtonness" that is so clearly surrounding all of his other films, including his other Disney Remake in Alice in Wonderland. He seems to be trending into a more level area in terms of his directing and this is definitely better than some of the other awful films he's done.
The acting in this movie, while cheesy in many aspects, is also pretty good. Colin Farrell is as always a good actor and both Danny DeVito and Michael Keaton are enjoyable roles as well. The kid actors are just meh, but I'd say one of the best performances goes to Eva Green as the performer of Colette in Vandevere's show. Not Oscar worthy, but she can at least sell the idea of the story well enough that I think it's worth mentioning.
While Dumbo's CGI can be a little overbearing, in comparison to the next two films we'll be talking about, it's definitely more watered down. It's probably because of how much smaller the budget of this film was in comparison to both Aladdin and The Lion King, but I can appreciate this film not being a CGI slopfest that so many films have become over the years.
Overall: Dumbo's greatest flaws are in it's forgettability. I may detest Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin with the passion of a fiery thousand suns, but I know those remakes have their fans. I don't know why, but they do. This film doesn't have anyone who talks about it. I mean, it made about 25% of what it's predecessor and successor made, so it makes sense, but there are not many vocal fans out there. It's kind of like a Film Fart. It happened, it was generally unpleasant but inoffensive, but nobody is going to really remember this film for anything. The original film at least has the controversies of it's past to hang it's hat on (the Pink Elephants scene, the racist crows and the music). But this one? Well, it's kind of a skippable film. Not terrible, but probably not worth your time.
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