It had a lovely score by Frank Churchill and Oliver Wallace, and had several memorable songs, including the energetic “Casey Junior,” the hallucinatory “Pink Elephants on Parade,” the celebratory “When I See an Elephant Fly,” and the beautiful lullaby “Baby Mine,” which was nominated for an Oscar for Best Song.

Interestingly, the new film excises several of the original film’s plot points entirely, including Dumbo’s relationship with the anthropomorphic ringmaster mouse Timothy, and Dumbo’s encounter with the ‘Jim crows,’ although the latter is probably a good thing due to the overtly racist overtones of those characters.Ĭonsidering how well-loved the music from those early Disney classics are, I have always felt that the music from the original Dumbo was curiously under-valued. The basic core of the story is the same – a young baby elephant is born in a traveling circus and is ridiculed by crowds for his enormous ears, until he wins over audiences with his ability to fly – but it adds a great deal of depth and back story to the supporting human characters, including the good-hearted elephant keeper Holt (Colin Farrell), circus owner Medici (Danny De Vito), trapeze artist Colette (Eva Green), and unscrupulous businessman Vandevere (Michael Keaton), who wants to take over Medici’s circus for his own nefarious purposes.

The original Dumbo was short – just over an hour – and so director Tim Burton and screenwriter Ehren Kruger had to flesh out some additional material to make it feature length. The recent Disney trend of making live-action versions of their animated classics continues with Dumbo, a re-imagined version of their 1941 film about a baby elephant with ears so big that he can use them to fly.

Dumbo songs