Today we are #blessed with the first teaser trailer for professional kook Tim Burton‘s live-action reimagining of classic 1941 Disney animation, Dumbo.
Because it’s a Burton film, you’ve gotta expect something excessively stylised, a little dark, but above all, extravagant: although we’re choosing to think the set pieces for a kids movie will be more in keeping with the colour and fantasy of Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory than the unsettling, funny-but-sinister vibe of Beetlejuice or Mars Attacks!, a movie that still freaks me out to this day.
The movie’s obviously not a lot like the OG – there doesn’t seem to be a friendly talking mouse or anything 🙁 – except of course it features a baby elephant with massive ears who can freakin’ fly, so there’s that.
Burton’s gotten Colin Farrell on board to play a former circus star who returns to the Big Tent after the war, where the owner (Danny DeVito, obvs) assigns him the job of looking after a newborn elephant. The elephant, presumably still called Jumbo, is the subject of derision in the circus because of his ears, but it’s okay, because Farrell’s kids wanna be mates, and what’s better content than small children palling it up with a bb animal? Gotcha: there isn’t any.
Eva Green, Alan Arkin and Michael Keaton are all in the movie too – potentially to exploit Jumbo’s extraordinary talents.
Dumbo‘s just one of Disney’s efforts to enlist real big directors to reimagine their classic animations as live-action features for release next year: remember, Jon Favreau‘s directing Donald Glover and Bey in The Lion King; Guy Ritchie‘s tackling Aladdin featuring Will Smith; and Niki Caro‘s got Liu Yifei for Mulan.
The movie’s slated for release in the US in late March, and we’re keen as heck to see more of what Burton can do with the ornate circus visuals.
Here’s hoping Burton finds a way to incorporate the best scene in the original into the new flick: when Dumbo and his mouse mate get accidentally drunk on champers and have a weird psychedelic trip.
Did ya like that? You might also like this one, where someone cut the Dumbo footage with Tame Impala‘s ‘Elephant‘ and it just WORKS.
So Burton, if y’all reading this (course you are), I know you’ve got your mate Danny Elfman in for the score, but, how’s about a little bit of Kev Parker to add a bit of spice, huh? Trust me.
