![]() ![]() ![]() Will kids like Dumbo? Well, one small fellow seated in front of me at my screening seemed plenty engaged. It’s too bland to be really bitter or sweet. But there is still that faint sigh of “eh, whatever” hanging in the movie’s air, making Dumbo feel more depressing than melancholy. There’s nothing garishly horrible in Dumbo-unlike in Alice in Wonderland, say. That’s a wavelength that Burton has been on for a while, sadly-though his 2016 film Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children gave me hope that he was maybe finding his way again. These glorious moments of flight are made all the more bittersweet by the fact that what surrounds them-meaning, the rest of the movie-is such a glum splotch of nothing, a lazily decorated children’s film that seems bored by its own existence. Dumbo understands the simple and surreal majesty of this: a lonely little elephant who soars just when nearly everyone has counted him out. He flaps his mighty “wings” and goes zipping around under the circus big top, a smile of surprise and exhilaration on his animated face, all the humans of the story looking up in awe. It’s nice when Dumbo flies, which the little elephant with big ears does several times in Tim Burton’s Dumbo, a live-action reworking of the problematic 1941 animated feature (out March 29). ![]()
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