Few movies pack as many emotional punches per minute as "Dumbo," Walt Disney's lovely animated work from 1941. As a child, "Dumbo" might have struck you as an epic-length story, a veritable saga about an outcast circus elephant whose oversize ears turn out to be wings for flight. Actually, "Dumbo" ran a scant 64 minutes. Disney fought to release it as a feature rather than whittle it down further into a short.
Tim Burton's live-action "Dumbo" is the opposite: a padded-out feature that might have made a better one-hour television special. "Dumbo" features a CGI version of the floppy-eared title character, several human stars in newly created roles, and a script (by Ehren Kruger, of the "Transformers" films) that works in a few scenes of circus-centric spectacle. Add to this the twin obligations of modernization and diversification, and "Dumbo" has great difficulty getting off the ground.
The year is 1919, and horseback rider Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) has returned from World War I minus an arm. His young son, Joe (Finley Hobbins), has grown into an amiable enough kid, while his older daughter, Milly (Nico Parker), is a budding scientist. "I won't be a show off in your circus," Milly tells her dad. "I want to be noticed for my mind." Kudos to the film for its feminist spirit, even if Milly sounds less like a preteen girl than a male screenwriter with a mandate.
Holt is a potentially interesting character, but Burton is more interested in the wackier ones: Max (Danny DeVito), the crusty owner of the rundown Medici Bros. Circus; V.A. Vandevere, a showbiz Svengali played by Michael Keaton with silver hair and an inconsistent British accent; and the slinky-sexy trapeze artist Colette Marchant (Eva Green, a new Burton favorite). The original film's African-American crows, entertaining but reductive stereotypes who sang "When I See an Elephant Fly," are gone, replaced by sideshow workers with a wide range of "identities" _ an Indian snake charmer (Pramesh Singh), a plus size mermaid (Sharon Rooney) and so on.
"Baby Mine," the three-hanky lullaby from the first film ("sung," in a sense, by Dumbo's incarcerated mother), will wring a tear here as well. Still, Dumbo's photo-realistic eyes and wrinkly body don't engage us the same way that his idealized, ink-and-paint predecessor did. The original Dumbo flew as gracefully as a balsa-wood plane; the new Dumbo must flap his ears furiously just to get a foot or so of altitude. We never have confidence that he, or this film, will truly soar.
