Dumbo, now created with animatronic and digital effects, is still a cute, lonely pachyderm with impossibly large floppy ears who speaks to us with his soft pleading anthropomorphic Keane eyes (he has no dialogue.) When he’s slathered in clown make-up and forced to stand on top of a towering circus platform, his fear and humiliation are palpable. The flying sequences in Tim Burton’s “Dumbo,” a live-action reimagining of the Disney classic, have a touch of that same wonderstuck quality. In “Dumbo,” the magic of Dumbo’s ability to fly comes at the audience like a heavenly afterthought, one that tosses us into the sublime and leaves us there. When he does, he becomes a creature as enchanted in his yearning and escape as King Kong up on the Empire State Building or E.T. One of the more remarkable things about it is that Dumbo, after being cruelly separated from his mother (a primal twist that anticipates “Bambi”), doesn’t discover his ability to fly until the last six minutes of the movie. ![]() “Dumbo” was Disney’s fourth animated feature (after “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Pinocchio,” and “Fantasia”), and like Dumbo himself it’s a beautiful oddball - a solid-colored piece of stylized pop Americana, only 64 minutes long, at times almost a silent movie with sound effects. ![]() The key image in Walt Disney’s 1941 “ Dumbo” is something out of a fairy-tale daydream: Dumbo, the baby elephant with long-lashed goo-goo eyes, a cuddly grin, and ears as long and floppy as wings, flapping those ears to soar around a circus big top, flying over the crowds with a freedom as touching as it is inexplicable.
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