Dumbo (2019)
There's a moment in Tim Burton's Dumbo remake when you realise nothing is actually going to happen. Not emotionally, anyway. The big ears flap, the little elephant takes flight, the crowd gasps, and I felt absolutely nothing. That's not supposed to be possible with a flying elephant. That's practically a law of cinema. And yet here we are.
What makes this 2019 version so dispiriting isn't just that it's bad. It's that it's bad in such a specific, calculated way. This is a film assembled by committee, rubber-stamped by accountants, and handed to a director whose sensibility is so thoroughly smothered by corporate obligation that you'd barely know it was him. The gothic weirdness, the outsider sympathy, the dark humour that made Burton's best work sing, it's all still vaguely present, like a smell you can't quite place, but it's been diluted to the point of irrelevance. The film looks like Alice in Wonderland crashed headfirst into a second-rate circus melodrama and neither survived the impact.
Strip away Tim Burton's name and the Disney logo and ask yourself what's actually here. You've got a CGI elephant with enormous sad eyes and zero expressiveness beyond those enormous sad eyes. You've got a struggling family of circus performers who discover the elephant can fly, and then a parade of greedy businessmen who want to exploit him. And you've got a script buried under circus jargon, awkward human subplots, and "believe in yourself" messaging delivered with all the conviction of a motivational poster in a dentist's waiting room.
The original 1941 film worked because it was simple and sincere. It had charm, it had music, it had Timothy the Mouse, it had that absolutely devastating scene with Dumbo's mother that could level a grown adult. This version strips all of that away and replaces it with hollow spectacle. Endless CGI. Drab, washed-out palettes that make every frame look like someone left a perfectly good circus out in the rain. The colour palette alone feels like a philosophical statement about the joylessness of the enterprise.
Dumbo himself is the central problem. Rendered in technically flawless CGI, he's weightless in every sense. He floats through scenes without landing in them. He has no voice, no mischief, no real presence beyond looking vaguely mournful. The original Dumbo made you root for him because he felt vulnerable and real, even drawn in two dimensions. This Dumbo feels like a very expensive screensaver. You can admire the render. You cannot love it.
The human characters, who take up a genuinely alarming amount of screen time in a film nominally about a flying elephant, don't help. They exist in a strange limbo between functional and forgettable, asked to carry emotional weight the script hasn't earned. The villain is telegraphed so broadly you could spot him from orbit. Every beat lands exactly where you expect it to, with a dull, predictable thud.
I think what frustrates me most is that Burton's gothic style isn't inherently wrong for this story. There's something genuinely strange and melancholy about circus life, about creatures and people put on display for other people's entertainment. A braver film might have leaned into that strangeness, might have found something thorny and interesting in it. Instead, the darkness is purely aesthetic, wallpaper rather than substance. It decorates the film without informing it.
As a remake it fails on every level. It doesn't honour what made the original special, it doesn't find a new angle that justifies its existence, and it doesn't even work as its own thing. It just exists. Another live-action Disney cash-in, another CGI shell where wonder used to be. I've sat through some of the other entries in this particular sub-genre with grudging neutrality, but this one genuinely annoyed me. The 1941 film is 64 minutes long. Watch that instead. You'll feel something.
One and a half stars.
Rating: ★½ (1.5/5)
Originally logged on Letterboxd.
