3/16/2024 0 Comments Disneys dumboFor those who go to see a live-action version of Dumbo this weekend because they want to see a live-action version of Dumbo, how is it? Well, it's aggressively fine. If you argue that the last two paragraphs are beside the point or not fair to the filmmakers who have little say in terms of what movie studios pay their amusement park employees, that's a fair point. And, yes, the film is just one more example of the challenge of taking a film like Dumbo at face value even while I know (thanks to the 2016 election) that plenty of folks will nod in agreement and still sign off or endorse the very real-world atrocities for which the film's most heartbreaking sequences are intended to parable. So, to a certain extent, Dumbo's "little guy versus big business" moralizing isn't quite as hypocritical as it might seem, even if it's laughably ironic considering current events. That being said, Disney conceded to a deal to bring its minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2021 just days after I saw Christopher Robin, and we learned just last week that many of the 4,000-plus employees laid off during the Fox takeover would be receiving one-to-two years of severance pay. Considering all of these films were made/released during Walt Disney's acquisition of 20th Century Fox and during various controversies concerning how Disney does or doesn't pay its fair share of Anaheim property taxes (and whether it pays its employees anything resembling a living wage), they are either evidence that the Mouse House lacks self-awareness or that its artists are implicitly disagreeing with the choices being made by the higher-ups. And all three films have much to say about the rights of workers, the inherent corruption of big business, and the notion of seemingly friendly corporate tycoons secretly trying to screw the little guy. Like Mary Poppins Returns, it places its story in post-World War I and deals with a patriarch grieving the recent death of his wife. Like Christopher Robin, it places the story just after a major world war and features a patriarch dealing with PTSD.
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