Oh no! They’ve turned Dumbo into right-on mumbo jumbo
Dumbo (PG) ★★✩✩✩
WAlT Disney’s 1941 animation Dumbo was a huge favourite in our house when my children were little. They were captivated by the story of the baby circus elephant with ears so big they enabled him to fly.
The harrowing separation from his mother, not to mention the hallucination scene in which a drunken Dumbo sees a parade of pink pachyderms, did not deter them from watching it again and again. And again.
It is hard to picture Tim Burton’s liveaction reimagining of the Dumbo story claiming the hearts of generations of children in the same way, or anyone clamouring to see it repeatedly.
Today’s computer-generated imagery cannot make an elephant fly quite as convincingly as a team of clever animators could almost 80 years ago.
For that reason, and several others, this latest non-musical Disney version – hard though it tries – never recaptures the abundant charm and magic of the original. A few good songs might have helped.
On paper it makes sense for Burton, who once gave us a man with scissors for hands, to work with an elephant with ears for wings. The 60-year-old director of the 1990 fantasy film Edward Scissorhands is something of an oddball himself and likes to tell stories about social and physical misfits. But on screen, Burton’s antipathy towards zoos and circuses looms all too large.
Of course, animal cruelty should be abhorrent to everyone, yet his film is undermined by the worthiness of its animal rights message. Circuses don’t have to be magnets for leering voyeurs. They can be places of innocent joy, too.
As for the narrative, Burton and screenwriter Ehren Kruger have given it a sharp twist. In 1919, First World War veteran Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns with only one arm. Previously, he’d been an acclaimed horseman with the Medici Brothers circus.
Now, sneaky Max Medici (Danny DeVito) wants to downgrade him to elephant carer. Yet Holt’s children’s loss is even greater: while daddy was away at war, mommy died in a flu epidemic.
This gives us a double whammy of motherlessness, because the circus’s prize elephant Mrs Jumbo is carted off in chains for causing a hoo-ha in the Big Top.
So poor Jumbo Junior, propelled into the air whenever a feather makes him sneeze and renamed Dumbo by a typically boorish audience member, has only the Farrier kids – Milly ( Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins) – as a source of love. For Max Medici, meanwhile, Dumbo is good for one thing: box office takings. His business is on its uppers. He needs all the help he can get. But Dumbo’s unique talent, and associated misadventures, attract the attention of a much greater showman, the ruthless VA Vandevere (Michael Keaton). He wants this elephantine smash for his super- circus, and he wants his sexy, French, trapeze artist girlfriend Colette Marchant (Eva Green), to ride the little weirdo through the air. He makes Max his partner, promising him a taste of the big time. All is going swimmingly, or rather flyingly, until Dumbo is lured out of the Big Top by the call of dear old momma.
So Vandevere schemes to have her terminated, only – and since this is a Disney film, I really don’t think this counts as a spoiler – to be thwarted by a righteous alliance of the Farriers, Colette and all the ‘freaks’ in the circus. SOME
of this is fun. Some of it shows great expertise in computer special effects. Dumbo is pretty much as he was in the 1941 version, with big, blue eyes that either sparkle with happiness or cloud with sorrow. And it’s always a pleasure to see Keaton and DeVito (deadly enemies as Batman and the Penguin in Burton’s 1992 Batman Returns) bounce off one another. They get some slick one-liners, as does venerable Alan Arkin, who steals the few scenes he’s in as the financial muscle behind Vandevere.
But there are a few crucial ingredients missing here, and one thing very much present that nobody acknowledges. The animal rights message is hammered hard.
Dumbo certainly doesn’t get drunk as he does (on champagne) in the original. And the words of When I See An Elephant Fly, wonderfully performed by the jivetalking crows but subject in recent years to accusations of racist stereotyping, are here put in the mouth of the (white) ringmaster.
Yes, I’m afraid political correctness is the elephant in the room. Dumbo is in cinemas across the UK from Friday