It picks up almost in the exact instant that wholly-new material enters the picture, but this is merely a rise from "borderline unwatchable" to "comfortably dull".Īnyway the new version of the old material makes a peculiar dodge towards flat realism peculiar because in addition to being a children's quasi-fantasy, Dumbo '19 is directed by Tim Burton, a man you hire for the specific reason that realism is not a priority. So far, so mediocre: screenwriter Ehren Kruger (at this point more than a decade and a half removed from his last film that was even tolerable, let alone "good") is at a complete loss to fix the gruesome drag on momentum that's almost necessarily going to come from this graft, and the film is an unbelievably tedious grind as it laboriously re-works the original chain of events. The new film compresses the old film basically into one hectic, overlong first act, and gives a couple of specific events cameos, and then uses a brand new plotline not even vaguely hinted at in 1941 to fill out more than half of its 112 minutes. Well, at last it gets pretty far away from the original. That sets the bar pretty unspeakably high, and the best we could hope for would be that the 2019 Dumbo would get far enough away from the original that it isn't constantly calling attention to how much weaker it is. I do not know if this necessarily means that Dumbo is one of the single best examples of character animation that has ever existed but he is, anyway. It also boasts, in its title character, one of the highest triumphs of supervising animator Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, a strong candidate for the title of "best animator in the history of the medium". Where all this falls apart, of course, is that the 1941 Dumbo is an out-and-out masterpiece, gaining much of its rich power from that extreme brevity and fabulistic quality. Of all the films that might conceivably be a candidate for the remake machine, this is one of the few that flatly requires the people making it to do some actual creative work, and at this point in the cycle, actual creative work is something to be grateful for. Basically, Dumbo actively forestalls any possibility of doing the excruciatingly lazy thing and simply assembling a line-for-line, shot-for-shot remake, maybe with some bells and whistles jammed onto it to ruin the story structure, à la the dreadful 2017 Beauty and the Beast. The original film is pure bedtime story, 64 minutes of simple story beats, not so much telling a story as presenting a series of moods in watercolor plus, most of the last 20 minutes includes racial caricatures that had absolutely no prayer in Hell of making it into 21st Century family film. If we must get these Disney remakes of their animated features done in unattractive, narratively slack live-action/CGI hybrids - and 2019 is making a particularly loud case that we must - I would say that you could honestly do a lot worse than picking up 1941's Dumbo as a target.
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