Disney, with its newest trend of realistic “live action” remakes of their beloved animated classics, released the teaser trailer for Dumbo (2019). It seems this time around the story will be centered around the humans who care for Dumbo post separation and less on Dumbo himself. This new direction is kind of disheartening as it seems that Tim Burton is putting aside all of the magic and wonder of the original for a more human-centric version. One can’t help but to imagine that there’s going to be a lot lost in this shift, especially the animals perspective of the horrors of working a circus.
The whole cast is here and the costume design would probably more impressive if we weren’t just coming off The Greatest Showman, which really puts this to shame. Speaking of the cast, Collin Firth is down an arm, and Timothy Q. Mouse has been replaced with a small child…hooray? We get brief looks at Danny DeVito who does in fact look like the owner of a circus as well as Micheal Keaton who has white hair! We end the trailer with a montage of the cast, a few scenes from the original (the parade and the pink elephants) and finally with Dumbo soaring through the air off of the high platform. The scene looks great, especially the CG work on Dumbo, except that it is LITERALLY THE END OF THE FILM. I know that this is a remake so going in we should all know the story of Dumbo, but there are still better ways to do a teaser than just playing through the movie on fast forward.
The film is scheduled to be released in March of 2019 so we will be getting a lot more information, and hopefully better trailers, before then.
