Dumbo - Movie Review

The cute and lovely flying elephant Dumbo has landed with a life action remake. But this time the story has grown beyond Dumbo and is experienced from the humans point of view. The Medici Brother's circus is struggling in these post world war 1 times and buys a pregnant elephant in hope to use a baby elephant as an attraction. But the baby elephant Dumbo is born with a giant set of ears making it a subject of laughter and bullying. Mother Jumbo tries to protect her son from harm and causes an accident that kills a man. Mother Jumbo gets sold and Dumbo feeling sad and alone works together with the human kids Milly and Joe to save his mom.
The classic Dumbo movie has a narrow story line that goes something like this: Dumbo gets born, picked on, drunk and then all his problems gets solved. It is therefore great to get this remake of the story for it brings so much more too it. Now Dumbo has a deeper and better character arch in an interesting circus world. It is much more emotional and wholesome as the problems and hardship actually gets resolved without getting a child elephant drunk. But what the movie gets in story, it loses in songs. Only one of the original songs remains and that is mother Jumbo's song to Dumbo, now song by one of the circus folk. The other songs are referenced to in monologue or hummed.
The animations was for the most parts fine. I could not with complete certainty say which animals was animated and which were real. But when Dumbo was flying and his legs were running in the air. It looked silly and could have been done better. The same goes for the acting, in several scenes, the acting seemed off. The reactions and movement did not always fit to the situation. An example is in this one scene where some guards are sent to apprehend someone outside an burning building and out of nowhere some firemen runs up and stops the guards without saying why and without affiliation to the one who was to be apprehended.
All in all it is a good movie and it is way better than the old classic. If you do not believe me, you probably only partly remember the classic version. It would have been nice if all the songs had been kept or if it had been done more like the remake of The Jungle Book. I will give it four out five stars as it is good but it could still be better.