Dumbo: Tim Burton grows wings (Review)

This somewhat dreaded live-action remake is perhaps Tim Burton's best film since Big Fish.

In spring 2019, the editorial staff of First was not very excited to discover the adaptation of Dumbo live by Tim Burton for Disney. Surprise: this family film to see again this evening on W9 is more successful than the recent achievements of the filmmaker who had such an impact on us at the turn of the 1980s-1990s thanks to Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Batman and its sequel The challenge or a little later Ed Wood And Sleepy Hollow.

So to wait until this rebroadcast, we are sharing our enthusiastic review below. While waiting to discover, next September, if his new Beetlejuice will be successful!

Roller coasters and pink elephants: Tim Burton gives us his vision of Dumbo

Let's admit it from the outset: we were reluctantly going to see the new Tim Burton, who has been making his cinema debut for quite some time. The promise of magic, humor and emotion was no longer really there, the Tim team was over, the critics as a whole were gradually turning away from the man who had been their darling child in the 90s –Edward Scissorhands has Sleepy Hollow. On paper, Dumbo was not meant to reconcile them. Another live adaptation of a Disney classic after the Blossomé Alice in Wonderland ? What next ! Would Tim Burton have heard the criticism? His 2019 version of The Adventures of the Flying Elephant has never been more Burtonian, visually, emotionally and symphonically.

High fidelity
Originally the fourth Disney classic (set between Fantasy And Bambi) is a model of purity: a short story (1h04) of learning about a baby elephant with large ears that allow him to fly, an extraordinary gift that he will develop with the help of a mouse within a traveling circus. Cruel allegory about the star system (ah the unforgettable clowns and naughty children!) coupled with the heartbreaking portrait of a outcast orphan (incredibly expressive), Dumbo was a series of pieces of bravery whose climax was “the dance of the pink elephants”, forever engraved in our children's hearts. How was Burton going to manage to fit all this into the framework of a blockbuster full of special effects? Simply by focusing on flesh and blood characters. Exit the potentially animated mouse, make way for the Farrier family: the father, Holt, a 14-18 veteran now a penguin, and his two children, Milly and Joe, orphans of their mother who will naturally become attached to the baby elephant, separated from his own. And Burton beautifully and effectively reinvents the scenes from the original film by integrating them quite naturally into this double learning story. As for the animation, its fluidity and accuracy are as palpable in the flight scenes as in Dumbo's expressions – whose animality is otherwise preserved. A humble technical tour de force which shows that Burton has learned the lessons of his Alice…plastically hypertrophied.

A meta film
The other great success of the film lies in its anti-system discourse, at work in the second part of the story. Burton makes an entertainment mogul (played by the delightful Michael Keaton), inventor of a huge theme park (well, well), the big bad guy of the story who will try to exploit Dumbo to the detriment of the fairground workers who collected him. Cynical entertainment industry vs. passionate craft: there is something deliciously transgressive about seeing this film flourish within the Disney studio with which Burton has always had an ambiguous connection. Needless to say, who comes out of it growing…

Here is the trailer for Dumbo :

Eva Green: “Tim Burton and I…”