Jean-Paul’s rating: 1/5 stars

Bottom Line: Towards the end of the movie, Alan Arkin exclaims, “This is a disaster! Let’s go get some hot dogs.” This summarizes my take on the movie better than anything I could write. Of course, this is not going to stop me from writing about it anyway.

How do you make a live action film out of a beloved Disney classic cartoon? Well, first you take everything good about the cartoon and throw it out the window and now that you have the skeleton of the original story, you fatten it up with a whole bunch of good actors in really crappy roles and have them act as over the top as possible while throwing in some lessons about science or something. There you have “Dumbo”! On the plus side, while they were throwing everything out, they also threw out the casual racism.

There isn’t a single character in this film that I didn’t wan’t to punch in the face at some point or another in this film. Including the child actors. They, at least, can be forgiven because they are too young to know any better. All the adults, I am just going to assume that their own children forced them to take their roles under punishment of ostraciization from the family. It is the only explanation. The best of the bunch, such as it was, is Eva Green as the trapeze artist Collette Marchant. The rest? Ugh. Danny DeVito: horrible. Colin Farrell: revolting. Michael Keaton: 2,000 feet over the top. I like to believe that the only person cognizant of how bad a film they all were in is Alan Arlin and his “This is a disaster!” line was adlibbed and he refused to do another take so they had to leave it in.

There are quite a few homages to the original cartoon which ranged from appreciated to crimes against nature. Timothy Q. Mouse is present, even though he doesn’t have a speaking role. They do a short tip of the hat to the racist crows, replacing them with a Black jazz band. They also completely bastardized “Pink Elephants” into a gaudy and stupid CGI-ed circus show, which I really could have done without. Some of the original soundtrack was remade for the movie, most prominently “Baby Mine”, but also “Casey Jr.”, “When I See An Elephant Fly”, and “Pink Elephants”. Danny Elfman did the rest of the score and, well, he’s Danny Elfman so you know it’s enjoyable.

This movie was directed by Tim Burton, but I can only imagine that Disney kidnapped him, shackled him, and waterboarded him any time he came up with any uniquely Tim Burton idea that didn’t fit with the Disney persona. This is all Tim Burton ideas so I don’t understand why he was captured to direct.

The elephant was legitimately cute and the off-the-wall-ness of all of the characters might be something that kids these days go for, I guess. The kids in my showing seemed to be enjoying themselves, at least. There is certainly better children’s entertainment out there, though. Go see that instead.