For what it's worth, Dumbo has an endearing sense of wonder and spectacle that makes it pleasantly entertaining, framed and constructed with an old-fashioned touch like from an Americana snapshot. The aesthetic is like a spiritual successor to Burton's own Big Fish, and could almost pass as a side story in that movie's wildly weird universe, and I'm okay with that. If anything, that made this feel the most involved Burton has been in a while, and the most visually inspired he's been since Sweeney Todd. With such an inventive, vivid dreamlike energy fueling him, you feel completely enveloped in his lush world, especially thanks to Rick Heinrichs' virtuoso production design, whose blend of real and virtual sets lend so much mysticism and childlike imagination.
And that's further aided by the creation of Dumbo himself. He's always been one of the most adorable character designs in Disney's animated pantheon, and somehow they managed to make him even cuter. While 2D certainly allows the elephant to be more expressive, he's lost none of that personality and character through the transition to CGI, finding a nice blend between realism in movement and fantastical whimsy. It's so important that you be able to feel and empathize with the little elephant, and you care for the little guy, and feel for him through the heartbreak. Of course everyone remembers the "Baby Mine" segment, a sequence I admit I've always felt cold to, and this new rendition didn't do anything for me either. But even still, you feel the pain of the little guy, and you cheer for him when he makes his triumphant flights through the sky, which are wonderfully exciting to experience.
I just wish his human counterparts were so compelling. Despite being the title character, Dumbo isn't really the lead. That honor goes to Colin Farrell as Holt Farrier, a former circus performer and returning WWI veteran, who takes up a new job as the elephant's caretaker. And all due credit to Farrell, he's trying his best. He sells his moments of wonder well, but he's very bland company to be paired with. Of course, there's also some darker connotations to his characterization the movie is less interested in, with his arm having been amputated in the war, his wife died from influenza while he was away, and it feels like all of those details are little more than sidenotes for added sympathy, rather than deep issues that the movie has any interest in tackling or addressing.
You never even see what kind of emotional impact his children have experiencing all of this, or see any type of divide it's put up between them (even though such things are clearly implied here). But as much as Farrell is let down, his children are very wooden stand-ins, largely only existing to fulfill their necessary beats in the story, and not helping are their performers' lack of strongly felt emotion. Nico Parker as his daughter Milly especially doesn't project much, often going through scenes with a vacant stare, made all the more noticeable when paired up against their CGI counterpart.
Elsewhere in the supporting cast, returning Burton fixture Michael Keaton has a grand time as V.A. Vandemere, the charismatic and opportunistic founder and proprietor of the Dreamland circus. It's a role that offers Keaton a delightfully hammy villainous turn, and he's clearly enjoying sinking his teeth into the scenery as his grasp and his expectations expand, single-handedly stealing the show anytime he shows up. But almost stealing the show from underneath *him* is Eva Green as trapeze artist Colette Marchant, dubbed the queen of the circus, she winds up becoming a sweet and enchanting embodiment for the film's heart, proving once again how underutilized Green is in the industry. Fellow Burton mainstay Danny DeVito is also fun as circus owner Max Medici, but it's largely a rehash of his very similar character from Big Fish, and inconsistent in how we're meant to feel about him. At some points he's sleazy and opportunistic, while at other points he's conversely meant to feel sympathetic. True, he does have an arc where's he meant to go from seeing his circus as a business, and instead as a family, but it didn't play or sit consistently.
And consistency is where this film did start to unwind for me. The second act of this movie started to get quite sluggish for me, as it's only halfway through that we're finally introduced to Vandemere's Dreamland circus, which feels a little too late into the movie to be doing that. And while Burton's creativity is on fire a lot of this movie, there's also plenty of nonsensical elements that feel needlessly random. I kid you not, at one point, sports announcer Michael Buffer comes in with a spin on his "Let's get ready to rumble" catchphrase. Things like that really started taking me out of the movie, and they're peppered in so many places.
I also feel this movie gets a little artificial when it comes to conflict. Much of this comes from Dumbo's continual separation from his mother, and the Farrier children's attempts to reunite the two. And while those are entertaining in their own right, they started to feel repetitive to me. Case in point, the early cause for separation is Medici's sleazy animal wrangler who abuses the creatures, before meeting an untimely demise. In his place, we have another skeevy overseer of operations, who serves as Vandemere's right hand man. Why did we need two of these characters? Not only that, but the climax, while serving as a sweet finale, really didn't hold any weight for me, because while I grew to love Dumbo, I didn't feel that same love for the Farriers, leaving me halfway engaged and halfway cold to it.
But even so, and with the added benefit of mild hindsight, I still enjoyed Dumbo a good deal. Being offered freedom to depart from its predecessor, it dared to carve out its own path, and at least justified the reason for its existence. But even for those childhood fans of Dumbo, you'll still get solid enjoyment out of the integrations of those callbacks, and their modernized representation. Go-to Burton composer Danny Elfman gets a lot of mileage from his use of the original songs and score, that mingle seamlessly with his new contributions. No matter how familiar it is, Elfman's classic sound never fails to melt my heart.
But Dumbo could have, and should have been better than it was. It's a decent and enjoyable film, and nowhere near the disaster as could have been expected from the writer behind Skids and Mudflap, but it's still nowhere near a return to Burton's peak as a filmmaker. That Big Eyes is still his best film this decade is kind of disappointing.
*** / *****
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