![]() But in a more important sense we are right in 2019. Holt comes home from the conflict a wounded veteran. ![]() The first movie was set in 1941, the year of its release (a newspaper front page announcing Dumbo’s airborne triumph also had stories about Britain’s Spitfires) this version takes us back to just after the first world war. View image in fullscreen Painfully de-tusked … Dumbo. ![]() Yet this important factor is almost forgotten about in the swirl of exotic Burton visuals. Burton could have made much more in narrative terms of Dumbo being taken away from his poor mother. The nice humans are the original heart-of-gold circus impresario, played by Danny DeVito, the trapeze artist Colette (Green) and widowed trainer Holt Farrier (Farrell), whose two children fall in love with little Dumbo. There is a bad animal handler at the first circus (whose fate is to be the muddled pretext for the punishment of Dumbo’s mother), an equally cruel handler at the shiny new circus Dumbo is tricked into signing up for, and of course the smooth, wicked new entertainment entrepreneur VA Vandevere (Keaton). The drama elaborately creates a number of bad humans whose purpose is to quarantine the good humans’ heroic status. Here, Dumbo’s friends are strictly homo sapiens. It is thrown away in a single, flat, almost embarrassed sequence after a muddled buildup, without the proper anguish and rage at injustice, because the film is really coy about imposing bad-guy status on human beings who are expected to partake in the happy ending – and, incidentally, it abolishes Dumbo’s best and only pal Timothy the mouse. It is the most heartrending moment in Disney history, sadder than the death of Bambi’s mother or Simba’s father, because Dumbo’s mum is still alive, enduring a waking nightmare of humiliation and slave-master cruelty.ĭumbo Reloaded loses its nerve on this. Poor Dumbo can visit her only in secret, at night, twining his little trunk around hers, stretched out from between the bars. This remake makes a mess of the most famous scene: the brutally, brilliantly, almost unwatchably sad moment when Dumbo’s mum furiously grabs some boys from the audience who had been bullying her child and spanks them with her trunk, for which she is shackled and imprisoned in a tiny cart with the placard “Danger Mad Elephant”. View image in fullscreen Heart-of-gold circus folk … Colin Farrell and Eva Green.
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