Tim Burton is on track to direct a live-action Dumbo for Disney (yes, really). If you’re an OG Dumbo fan, you probably either found it hard to swallow this news or hard to swallow the tiny bit of vomit you threw up in your mouth when you first caught glimpse of the story.
I, also being a Dumbo fanatic, throated this news with relative ease (to put it gracefully), for I believe Tim Burton could be a very smart choice of director for this project.
That’s not to say I don’t recognise the main fear; his previous reboots vary from ‘a little bit shit’ to ‘quite a bit shit’.
Despite being a commercial mega-hit, 2010’s Alice in Wonderland was an exhausting blow-out for Burton. It took a tremendous amount of accidental effort to suck the wonder out of Wonderland, but he somehow did it. I don’t personally think the movie’s all that bad, but that opinion is challenged every time I think of Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter dance.
Before that, Burton put Depp in more makeup and another silly hat in 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I never saw it, but I have been informed that Burton somehow managed to make the premise of a candy empire king named Willy inviting little children into his factory of doom significantly creepier than 1971’s already kinda creepy family musical.
And then there’s his 2001 pièce de ré-shit-ance Planet of the Apes, Burton’s two-hour face-palm-inducer with an ending that tried to pull the rug from under our feet – only to realise it was standing on the same damn rug.
Aside from being reboots/remakes/rewhatevs, the quality these films share is a similarity in setting: worlds bombarded with unusualness. Whether it’s the madness of wonderland, an Earth overthrown by apes, or some psycho’s candy factory, Tim Burton created lands in these films that let his imagination go like an inflated balloon – whizzing around aimlessly before landing into a flaccid lump on the ground.
Dumbo is not that kind of story.
Sure, the film is set in the circus world populated by carnival ‘freaks’, but it’s a world that remains grounded in a rather depressing reality (here’s your proof). When Dumbo is dumped onto the scene by a crane (who deserves a bonus for that delivery), he becomes the central ‘freak’ of the show where he is put on display for the ‘norms’ to see.
Ultimately, it’s the story of a sweet, well-meaning and charming character who is different from everyone else – a ‘freak’ – trying to make sense of a world that can’t make sense of its existence.
When Tim Burton is allowed to focus his energy in the unusualness of the central character, as opposed to stretching his focus out on the world around them, he shines. He has always been great at telling these kinds of stories with the likes of Edward Scissorhands, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Ed Wood, and the recent Frankenweenie. This might make him a one-trick pony, but at least Disney’s asking for that trick.
Perhaps you’re still not convinced, but if there’s anything you can be assured on, it’s that the black crows in Tim Burton’s Dumbo are more likely to reference Edgar Allan Poe than… you know… 1940s racism.
