Sn March 20, the Walt Disney Company completed its acquisition of 20th Century Fox, thus making Disney the biggest, most powerful, most unkillable behemoth in the media landscape, and strategically positioning it for the upcoming launch of Disney+, a Netflix-rivaling subscription streaming service. Eight days later, the newly engorged corporation released Dumbo, a live-action remake of one of its oldest and most beloved cartoon properties.
I can’t actually believe that this new Dumbo is, in fact, a direct commentary on Disney’s far-reaching corporate tentacles and a pointed allegory of what happens when a little whiff of magic gets subsumed by big-money interests. And yet, here Dumbo is—a strange, lumbering, overcooked thing that takes a sweet, slender story about a flying elephant and blows it out to jumbo proportions, all while delivering a meta-text precisely about why such an undertaking is a misguided and morally corrupt idea.