Tim Burton
Dumbo

A little freak elephant with two very melancholic big eyes. They take him high, to the top of the tent, and he doesn't know what to do, surrounded by flames. He doesn't yet know he can fly.

Dumbo with a clown-like, slightly horror-painted face is certainly a promising image, seemingly marrying the Disney fairy tale with the Burtonian vision in just the right way. It's a pity, then, that the film stumbles and squanders the enormous potential of the story, which is reviewed and expanded for the occasion.

Dumbo is an albatross, an outcast, whose clumsiness and deformity hide enormous potential, and what seems like flaws, monstrosities, are precisely the tools that allow him to fly. Dumbo is not so different from his friends in the Medici circus, a suffering crowd always on the edge, laughing at his misfortunes, trying to find strength despite the losses, the mutilations.

Dumbo is the marvelous monster that brings them to prominence, that makes them dream a little, a dream teetering on the void, which can only be supported by those big ears that make the small animal fly and with him his entire family.

Dumbo is a puppy, taken away from his mother for mere economic speculation, a sideshow phenomenon who resists and flies supported only by the hope of seeing her again, naively convinced that the promises made to him will be kept.

All this goodness is squandered or almost. Little psychological depth, a childish handling of themes, and a terrible second half that focuses entirely on action, using truly poor narrative shortcuts, and essentially decrees Disney's victory over Tim Burton, who hasn't been himself for a while now.

It is surprising the laziness of the director who accepts upright a series of two-dimensional characters that are frightening (the screenwriter is the one from Transformer and the Ghost in the Shell of 2017, chills). The melancholy remains almost only in the (spectacular, excellent graphics) big eyes of the little elephant, for the rest a sickly sweet moralism seasoned with easy, childish giggles dominates.

Even the good idea of DreamLand gives very little because there's a lack of vision to support the plot. There is no real perspective on the themes being brought, they are just thrown in for the heck of it. Indeed, the little flavor becomes disgust in the face of a series of crude steps, overused caricatural figures, and in general, an immature and superficial handling of the story. And Burton has no tricks up his sleeve to redeem everything with aesthetic shots.

The finale is a condensation of good feelings by the kilo, which is pitiful in how clumsy and sugary it is and clumsily snatches the animalist theme that hadn't even been touched throughout the film. That's not the central issue of Dumbo. Bad bad indeed, to say that this seemed the most promising film of the series of remakes coming from mother Disney.

5/10