Dumbo: Full-Length Trailer For Tim Burton's Reimagining Might Make You Cry
Have a box of tissues at the ready, readers — the first full-length trailer for Disney's live-action Dumbo remake will likely get you all teary-eyed.
The House of Mouse dropped the new footage during CMT's Country Music Awards on Wednesday, November 14, giving audiences everywhere the best look yet at director Tim Burton's reimagining of the 1941 animated classic.
The new Dumbo trailer sets up the premise with which everyone is familiar — a circus elephant is separated from her baby, Dumbo, and the two must work to find a way to reunite — then tugs at heartstrings by teasing a host of new characters and some big struggles for the titular big-eared elephant.
Written by Ehren Kruger (The Brothers Grimm, Transformers: Age of Extinction), Burton's Dumbo centers on war veteran, widower, and ex-circus star Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), who lands a job at his old circus, tasked by his former boss Max Medici (Danny DeVito) to look after Dumbo. Holt and his two young children, Joe (Finley Hobbins) and Milly (Nico Parker), soon find out that Dumbo is no average elephant: his butterfly wing-like ears grant him the ability to fly — just the kind of attraction the struggling circus needs to become popular and profitable again.
Things take a turn for the worse when the enigmatic, money-oriented entrepreneur V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton) discovers Dumbo's talents, and makes it his mission to have Dumbo headline his new "entertainment venture" called Dreamland, which features such acts as the French trapeze artist Collette Marchant (Eva Green).
"You have something very rare," Keaton's Vandevere says. "You have wonder, you have mystique, you have magic."
As the trailer hints, Dreamland isn't all that dreamy — and Vandevere isn't as charming as he'd like everyone to believe. In acquiring Medici's circus and taking Dumbo for his own, Vandevere also gets rid of Dumbo's mother, sending Dumbo into a spell of sadness. Downtrodden and desperately missing his mother, Dumbo isn't able to fly. The Dreamland runners paint his face and trunk to look like a crying clown, and one seemingly very important person, Neils Skellig (Joseph Gatt), scoffs at his appearance and apparent lack of talent.
"He doesn't look like magic to me," he says in the trailer. (We're not crying, you are.)
Watch the trailer in full above, then take a peek at the colorful new poster for Dumbo below.
Though Burton has made a name for himself with his surreal and often grim films — like Beetlejuice, Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Dark Shadows, and many others — the filmmaker seems to have shied away from his beloved gothic horror to really dig into the fantasy of a children's movie with Dumbo. Of course, just because the film doesn't look as bizarre as Burton's past films or his other take on an iconic Disney tale, the 2010 feature Alice in Wonderland, doesn't mean it won't get dark — as hinted at in this trailer.
Burton's adaptation of Dumbo is also interesting because it isn't a cut-and-dry remake like many of Disney's most recent retellings have been. Beauty and the Beast followed the same beats as its animated predecessor, as did the Lily James-starring Cinderella remake. But Dumbo is something else — it introduces new characters who exist in an updated story, one that walks along a different path than the '40s classic. By the looks of the trailer, these changes and additions should make for a satisfying — and tearjerking — final product.
Dumbo will fly into theaters on March 29, 2019.
