The year is 1919, and his “circus” is really the world’s first theme park, a place called Dreamland that’s as packed with rides, exhibits, and chicanery as a small city. Vandevere believes in the go-big-or-go-home school of entertainment. Vandevere ( Michael Keaton), an entrepreneur in a silvery wig so ornate it makes Andy Warhol’s look organic. But the new “Dumbo” is a meandering parable about the world’s attempt to corrupt it.ĭumbo, whose real name is Baby Jumbo, is born into a barnstorming circus run by the scuzzy carny barker Max Medici (Danny DeVito), who gets bought out by V.A. A bulgy little elephant, as suffused with feeling as a silent-movie clown, lofting himself into the air: That’s still a marvelous image. Then, after ingesting a feather into his trunk (the superstitious ritual that gives him the faith to fly), he plunges downward and takes wing, and for a few moments you feel your heart soaring along with his.īut in the new “Dumbo,” our hero’s happy-sad flights of fancy aren’t the emotional culmination of the movie they start early on and happen periodically, to gradually lesser effect. Dumbo, now created with animatronic and digital effects, is still a cute, lonely pachyderm with impossibly large floppy ears who speaks to us with his soft pleading anthropomorphic Keane eyes (he has no dialogue.) When he’s slathered in clown make-up and forced to stand on top of a towering circus platform, his fear and humiliation are palpable. The flying sequences in Tim Burton’s “Dumbo,” a live-action reimagining of the Disney classic, have a touch of that same wonderstuck quality. In “Dumbo,” the magic of Dumbo’s ability to fly comes at the audience like a heavenly afterthought, one that tosses us into the sublime and leaves us there. When he does, he becomes a creature as enchanted in his yearning and escape as King Kong up on the Empire State Building or E.T. One of the more remarkable things about it is that Dumbo, after being cruelly separated from his mother (a primal twist that anticipates “Bambi”), doesn’t discover his ability to fly until the last six minutes of the movie. “Dumbo” was Disney’s fourth animated feature (after “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Pinocchio,” and “Fantasia”), and like Dumbo himself it’s a beautiful oddball - a solid-colored piece of stylized pop Americana, only 64 minutes long, at times almost a silent movie with sound effects. He also is known for his twisty thrillers such as Arlington Road, Skeleton Key and The Ring.The key image in Walt Disney’s 1941 “ Dumbo” is something out of a fairy-tale daydream: Dumbo, the baby elephant with long-lashed goo-goo eyes, a cuddly grin, and ears as long and floppy as wings, flapping those ears to soar around a circus big top, flying over the crowds with a freedom as touching as it is inexplicable. He has sole writing credit on the current Age of Extinction and co-wrote 2011’s Dark of the Moon and 2009’s Revenge of the Fallen with Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. The Transformers movies have occupied Kruger’s life for the past several years. The granddaddy of them all is the Johnny Depp version of Alice in Wonderland, which has earned more than $1 billion.Īmong the projects in the pipeline, Disney has a live-action take on Cinderella opening March 13, is in preproduction on The Jungle Book that Jon Favreau is directing and just put Bill Condon on a live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast. This is the latest classic animated title that Disney is turning into a live-action movie, and it’s a strategy that has paid off: Maleficent, the most recent example, is a re-imagining of the 1959 movie Sleeping Beauty and has grossed more than $630 million worldwide since its May 30 release. Also, the studio believes that because of the current state of CG technology, live-action movies featuring a soaring pachyderm (or any animal for that matter) are viable. The new take involves the adaptation of the original movie while adding a unique family story that parallels Dumbo’s story. The movie produced several classic songs, notably “When I See an Elephant Fly” “Baby Mine,” which was nominated for a best song Oscar and “Pink Elephants on Parade.”
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