17. Dumbo, 2019

With an eye for marvels and curiosities, Tim Burton has always had a thing for circuses, and they have appeared in most of his films. So, who better to direct a new Dumbo movie and tell the tale of a baby circus elephant rejected for his enormous ears who discovers he can fly? With his big blue eyes, the CGI version of Dumbo is just cartoony enough to avoid the uncanny valley of the ultra-realism seen in The Lion King “live-action” adaptation. But the issue with Burton’s version, as with many live-action Disney flicks, is that it stretches a short film into a nearly two-hour one.

While some changes, such as removing Timothy Q. Mouse and the racist crows, were necessary, the post-World War I story of a one-armed veteran and his children who take care of Dumbo isn’t engaging enough—despite all of Colin Farrell’s charms. Try as we may to invest in them, we just want to return to the main attraction: Dumbo. Unfortunately, Dumbo is Tim Burton’s ugliest film with haphazard CGI and muted colors that make it seem like the camera lens was smeared with mud. The only thing Dumbo has going for it is that the elephant is really, really cute.