The story of a weirdo outsider becoming a mainstream Disney stooge is one that should be very personal to Tim Burton, for obvious reasons. Yet here’s the director’s Dumbo trailer, and it looks as removed and impersonal as the rest of his late-career efforts—as wonderfully over-designed as his earlier work but now with a generic CGI sheen and the sense he wants you to forget his goth phase.
There are a few of Burton’s earlier trademarks in there, though: Batman returns, again, with Michael Keaton and Danny DeVito starring alongside Colin Farrell, Eva Green, a guy you’ll briefly think is a shorn Doug Jones but is actually Joseph Gatt, and Nico Parker—Thandie Newton’s daughter, who looks so much like a 13-year-old Thandie Newton, you’d swear Westworld abruptly started caring about characters actually looking like younger versions of themselves.
Dumbo‘s timeless concept of being riotously entertained by an elephant having slightly more exaggerated features than a normal elephant hits theaters March 29.
