Tim Burton's Dumbo

[Small Man Big Horse]

http://variety.com/2015/film/news/tim-burton-to-direct-live-action-dumbo-for-disney-1201449920/

It's not Burton on board alone though, apparently it's co-written by Ehren Kruger, who wrote the last three "Transformers" movies.

After I read the news I produced the following sounds:
"Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha."

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Dumbo is among the purest most glorious pieces of art for children in existence.

I hope their Dumbo is a parody of a Christopher Nolan movie with explosions fucking up walls and massive bass notes and men frowning while a suited serious looking Dumbo tacitly endorses torture to extract intelligence for the purpose of perceived expediency.

[biggytitbo]

Tim Burton couldn't direct a pea onto his fork.


Terrible, terrible film maker - especially when accompanied by his equally terrible avatar Johnny Depp.

[El Unicornio, mang]

He's made at least two great films with Depp (Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands) and Sweeney Todd was decent. The awful memory of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Alice in Wonderland still lingers though.

[Small Man Big Horse]

Tim Burton couldn't direct a pea onto his fork.


Terrible, terrible film maker - especially when accompanied by his equally terrible avatar Johnny Depp.

The first Batman, Beetlejuice, and Ed Wood are all fantastic films, and I've a fondness for Mars Attacks!, Big Fish and Scissorhands. But the bad far outweighs the good, sadly.

[BritishHobo]

I hope like Alice in Wonderland it starts out unique and atmospheric and then gives up twenty minutes in and becomes The Chronicles of Narnia.

[UncouthHayseed]

The recent trend of live-action-ifying[nb]A genuine verb. Honestly.[/nb] classic Disney animation - works of art, by my reckoning (watch Sleeping Beauty and tell me you are not awed by Eywinde Earle's stunning backgrounds) and undeniably important pieces of film history - is a trend I am hesitant to support.

Dumbo seems a strange movie to adapt, not least because its charm stems from its simplicity, made on a tight budget following the commercial failures of Pinocchio and Fantasia (Tim Burton is not known for his simplicity, I think we can all agree). Presumably the circus animals in this new adaptation will be computer-generated, animated, which begs the question: why make a live-action adaptation at all?

[NoSleep]

It's important for the world right now that the children of this generation don't end up the same as you lot[nb]Star Wars is mostly to blame[/nb], so they have allotted Tim Burton the job of shattering any childhood dreams that a film fantasy might engender in the next batch.

[Garam]

Batman Returns is the best Batman film. Most other films around that are a classic, especially Beetlejuice. I think he could possibly still make another great film, he just needs to be given a minute budget (by his current standards) in order to do it. Noone who can direct as great a film as 'Beetlejuice' at such a young age, can lose it, he's just been indulged too much and it's put him in a coasting coma for a decade and a half. I feel he's one of those guys that think too much about their next film while they're making their current one.

Is Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie worth watching for fans of his early stuff?

[NoSleep]

The best Tim Burton film is Ed Wood.[nb]Beetlejuice is fun, all the same[nb]His Batman films can fuck off, though[nb]Although nobody's done Batman very well in Hollywood[nb]I quite like the Adam West film from 1966, though.[/nb][/nb][/nb][/nb]

[Ballad of Ballard Berkley]

The best Tim Burton film is Ed Wood.

This opinion is correct. Edward Scissorhands is wonderful also, but in hindsight it was a dreadful harbinger of the drearily saccharine 'man-child' dreck that he and Depp would focus on for much of their subsequent careers.

I'd love it if Burton and Depp collaborated on something as genuinely distinctive, smart and heartfelt as Ed Wood again. Never gonna happen, though. Never gonna happen.

[Steven]

Wasn't Ed Wood the result of the screenwriters Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski's particular take on the subject matter though? Rather than crassly ridiculing Wood as everyone else would have written it, they tried to imbue it with such a lovable naivety. They talked about the process on Gottfried's podcast.

[DukeDeMondo]

They should get Harmony Korine to do it. Dummo, they could call it. Aha.

[Bad Ambassador]

Am I the only person who saw Big Eyes, then? It was good.

[garbed_attic]

PeeWee's Big Adventure is the best Burton movie, no question.

Also, the man has father issues.

[Pit-Pat]

Tim Burton's Dumbo
I thought his name was Johnny Depp

Tim Burton's Dumbo
I thought her name was Helena Bonham Carter

Tim Burton's Dumbo
I thought his name was Michael Gove (friends with Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter)

[UncouthHayseed]

Though I'm anxious about this movie, it would be a lie to say I'm not excited for Burton's take on the famous Pink Elephants on Parade sequence - a brilliant chunk of surreal cinema.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wR8FL_2gwI

This, from The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, is also great:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLnADKgurvc

[Steven]

I was going to make a joke about Helena Bonham Carter playing Dumbo with her huge forehead, a five-head if you will etc but actually I find it quite attractive, made worse in that shitty Alice film as they magnify her head to fuck-off levels.

[St_Eddie]

Tim Burton's Dumbo - the film no-one in the entire world ever wanted [nb]or indeed universe, should any extraterrestrials happen to be picking up our broadcast signals, millions of years from now.  Poor sods.[/nb].  Other than Tim Burton and some studio bean-counters, of course.  Also, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are more than likely already salivating at the prospect of dressing up as whimsical circus freaks - which would actually be the most merciful possible outcome of all this.

The alternative?  Well, let's just say that I've been having some unnerving visions of Depp overacting his way through some sort of prosthetic/CGI Timothy Q. Mouse abomination.  From my poor, abused mind's eye; it can only be described as looking like the result of Johnny Deep, Mike Myers in his highly punchable Cat in the Hat getup, that CGI Bonham/Queen-algorithm-gone-wrong from Burty's own Alice in Wonderland and a regular garden variety mouse were flung into Brundle's teleportation pod together (with little regard for the consequences on those who possess eyes).  What emerges from within the other pod is sickening.  Really quite grotesque.

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Dear Mr. (and Mrs.) Hollywood,

Honestly I just felt completely devoid of emotion as I sat there reading the news of your plans to produce a live action remake of Dumbo.  I mean, I know that a modern-day Tim Burton re-imagining of the timeless classic Dumbo is quite clearly a horrible, horrible idea.  I'm well aware, intrinsically, that having Ehren Kruger write it is worse than killing small babies with a big hammer.  However, I'm just so used to the constant stream of unnecessary remakes/reboots/re-imaginings/re-digestings/re-shittings these days, that such things no longer mean anything to me.  Nothing means anything to me anymore.

You won, Mr. Hollywood.  You finally went and did it.  You gone done wound me gears down.  On the other hand, it's kind of liberating to be free of hatred and all those other bothersome emotions.  I can now kill guilt free.  That guilt thing was becoming really rather irksome.  I had contemplated handing myself in to the authorities but now it's all okay.  Goods times lie ahead now.

Thanks, Hollywood.

[Wet Blanket]

Is Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie worth watching for fans of his early stuff?

Frankenweenie was really good, perhaps because it was based on a really early short it had a lot more of the unique and darker characteristics of his 80s/early 90s films.

Plus, anyone who makes a supposedly mainstream, wide-release, animated Disney film in black and white is okay in my opinion.

[Replies From View]

Batman Returns is the best Batman film.

There's a bit with a CD being played that ruins it.

[Eight Taiwanese Teenagers]

What about Sleepy Hollow? I like Sleepy Hollow.

This Dumbo sounds an awful idea. I already have nightmares about my children Preferring the new Willy Wonka and Alice to the versions I grew up with.

[BritishHobo]

I wanna see who they're gonna get to play Jim Crow and his crow mates.

[NoSleep]

...and if they have them reference "trucking":

truck
v.intr.
3. Slang To move or travel in a steady but easy manner.

[SavageHedgehog]

Am I the only person who saw Big Eyes, then? It was good.

I saw it, and I really quite liked it.

Not enough to give a Tim Burton Dumbo the benefit of the doubt though obviously. I'm not sure that would be possible.

[Jerzy Bondov]

fuck this

[Blue Jam]

PeTA are sticking their oar in now:

With PeTA calling for a welfare-friendly finale to Tim Burton's elephant remake, what other family classics need a more realistic coda?

None of them, you stupid pointless meddling cunts.

Even if Burton tells the misguided attention-seeking PeTA twats to fuck off this is still going to be even shitter than Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, a film that genuinely made me want to smash things.

[NoSleep]

Well, the original film stands, whatever. This can only be good news for those already harbouring a death wish for the remake (which promises far worse than anything PETA can mete out).

[Jerzy Bondov]

Dumbo is pretty bloody happy at the end of Dumbo. He's smiling!! I don't know what more they could possibly want.

[ajsmith]

Am I the only person who saw Big Eyes, then? It was good.

Yeah, that was great. Not a fan of Burton's at all, but I loved that 'un.