The Elephant I Locked Away

Watched it once as a kid and filed it away somewhere I didn’t plan to return to. Dead mother. Abused baby elephant. A hallucination sequence that I now understand involved cartoon intoxication but at age seven read as unmediated nightmare fuel. Dumbo was, for me, a quietly traumatizing experience dressed in primary colors, and I dealt with it the way I dealt with most things that disturbed me back then: refused to think about it again and threw away the key.

Disney’s live-action remake came out in 2019, directed by Tim Burton, with a cast that on paper suggested someone was taking the material seriously—Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Alan Arkin, and Eva Green, who manages to be compelling in anything regardless of what’s around her. Burton in particular seemed like the right call. His early work—Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands—dealt with exactly this kind of thing: the monstrous creature that turns out to be the most humane presence in the room. He understood lonely, misunderstood outsiders the way someone understands something they’ve actually felt.

The problem is that Burton stopped being that director sometime in the early 2000s and hasn’t fully come back. Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows had the visual vocabulary—murky palette, angular architecture, Helena Bonham Carter—but the emotional logic had gone somewhere else. They looked like Tim Burton films the way a cover version looks like a song. The notes are correct. The feeling is in another room.

The first full trailer was beautiful and left me cold. Which might have been my own fault—I came in already skeptical, already braced for the disappointment. Maybe the right move would have been to revisit the original first, make some kind of peace with it before letting Burton take a swing at it. Or maybe some things don’t benefit from a second look. Some memories work better locked up.

Eva Green, though. Whatever else the film turned out to be, she was probably worth it.