I have a correspondent who continually sends me glurge. If nothing else, it keeps me aware of what’s circulating in the glurge market. Last week I got two different videos featuring Cute Baby Elephants.
There’s no denying that baby elephants are cute, especially when (like kittens) they think they’re being fierce. But two videos in so short a time? And I noticed that these weren’t about baby elephants being cute-fierce, or being rescued. These were close-up ones about baby elephants being cuddly or mischievous.
then I remembered that Tim Burton’s live action-plus-CGI remake of Dumbo is scheduled to be released soon. at the end of this month, in fact. I couldn’t help wondering if these videos weren’t part of a silent ad campaign to drum up interest in the film without explicitly saying so.
Anybody else seen these? Thoughts?
Reddit’s r/BabyElephantGifs has been around since 2014 and it’s pretty popular. It certainly didn’t start out as a marketing ploy, but it’s not a bad idea to piggyback on the appeal.
I’m not saying that there weren’t such sites earlier. My argument was that cuddly baby elephant videos might be getting injected into glurge sources as a sneaky way of popularizing an upcoming movie about a cuddly baby elephant.
Are they using real elephants (particularly baby elephants) in the film? Because that’s how it would appeal to me: I can go see Dumbo and watch more baby elephants. But, without that, it would only serve as a reminder that Dumbo is coming.
I mean, based on the previews, the film is more about the humans this time, anyways. That’s how they’re making it fresh, instead of just repeating the original.
That to me is the big appeal. Dumbo isn’t a film where I think “I would love to see the same thing, but real.”
This looked interesting to me, beautiful trailer, until I found out Tim Burton was behind it. His films always look so great but feel totally empty and heartless. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland, Miss Peregrine were devoid of any charm.
I dunno… my feed is full of the usual dog/cat/bird videos and a strange uptick in opossum videos but I haven’t seen a baby elephant video in a while. I think it’s a coincidence on your end.
Unless there’s a live-action Disney opossum movie coming that I don’t know about.
Disney’s recent “live” remakes appear to be using CGI animals. That’s certainly the case with The Jungle Book and The Lion King.
In the case of Dumbo the titular baby elephant is certainly CGI – his eyes are WAY too big for a real baby elephant. Plus I’m sure they couldn’t coax the performance out of a real elephant that they’d want. Let alone get him to fly.
Possibly some of the “background” elephants are real, too, but I’ll bet anytime they have any sort of complex interaction between an elephant and another character they’re going to use a CGI creature.
