If you scroll down far enough on the Disney+ home page, the streaming service’s algorithm will probably give you the carousel of what it calls “Reimagined Classics.” There, you will find a disorienting jumble of reheated ideas. All the studio’s recent live-action remakes, blockbuster takes on movies that were already blockbusters, are in there. There’s also a Turner & Hooch TV show. There’s the 1996 101 Dalmations, with Glenn Close, as well as its sequel. There’s Tim Burton’s stop-motion feature version of his old Frankenweenie short. Garfield is there, for some reason. The Lindsay Lohan versions of The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday are there, too, as well as a 2018 Disney Channel musical re-reimagining of Freaky Friday.
The mere existence of this little carousel is a testament to Disney’s persistent self-cannibalism, a key part of the company’s strategy for decades. Once upon a time, Disney would selectively keep its old animated classics out of circulation, dropping them back into theaters or on VHS every few years. Even in the company’s pre-Disney Renaissance ’80s wilderness years, when new Disney movies weren’t making money, the corporation’s heads could always put Sleeping Beauty or Lady And The Tramp back into theaters, or it could release those films as white-clamshell VHS tapes, and they would reliably earn. In a changing world where that withholding is no longer possible, Disney has found another way to monetize its library: It has cranked out an endless line of CGI-heavy live-action remakes, banking on the idea that people will want to see some version of these old, reassuring stories told on big screens again.
In the second decade of the 21st century, this strategy proved hugely lucrative. In 2010, Tim Burton’s version of Alice In Wonderland piggybacked on the popularity of Avatar’s bugged-out 3D special-effects visions. Alice In Wonderland became one of that year’s most popular movies even though its own imagery is ugly enough to rip your corneas in half. Over the next few years, Disney followed that ghastly commercial triumph with things like Maleficent, Cinderella, and Beauty And The Beast—all hugely popular, none even remotely artistically necessary.
Some of those movies have been pretty good in one way or another. I loved David Lowery’s heartfelt mood-piece retelling of Pete’s Dragon a whole lot more than I ever liked the corny-ass original, and Jon Favreau’s hugely popular 2016 cover version of The Jungle Book was watchable empty-calorie spectacle that successfully invested its photorealistic animal characters with something resembling personality. But if any of these remakes had any aesthetic or artistic value, it almost seemed like this happened by accident, or at least without the encouragement of the company’s overseers. They existed only to capitalize on any and all goodwill that people had for the originals. If Bill Condon’s 2017 version of Beauty And The Beast was a garish, monotonous, two-hour eyesore, it still made more money than any non-Star Wars movie that year. It accomplished its objective.
2019 was the year that Disney weaponized all the intellectual properties in its portfolio and held the box office in an unbreakable chokehold. That year, seven of the eight highest-grossing films were Disney products; the other one, Sony’s Spider-Man: Far From Home, was an extension of a Disney franchise, made with Disney’s cooperation. 2019’s biggest hit and most dominant cultural phenomenon was Avengers: Endgame, the grand blow-off for an unprecedented storytelling experiment that had been cranking for more than a decade. (I wrote a long column about Endgame less than two years ago, so we’re talking about other stuff here.) The year’s biggest disappointment, Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, still grabbed more than $500 million from ticket-buying North Americans, good enough for the No. 3 spot on the year-end box-office list.
Americans paid a lot of money to see great, weird movies in 2019. Us, John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum, Knives Out, and Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood were all serious hits, but none of them could compete with what Disney was putting on the marketplace. In the last year that blockbuster theatrical releases were even theoretically possible, Disney cornered the market. Remakes were a huge part of that strategy, and Disney spammed the hell out of them, to the point where people started to wonder when the studio was going to run out of animated classics that could be remade.
In March, Tim Burton’s Dumbo only did lukewarm business and probably lost money, but that was fine. Disney had surefire hits on deck. In May, a blue computer-enhanced Will Smith starred in a take on Aladdin that was inexplicably directed by Guy Ritchie, and that one made a cool billion at the global box office. Then, in July, Disney followed up with its biggest gun: Jon Favreau taking on The Lion King, transforming the 1994 animated film into something that the company could market as a live-action remake even though it had no live action. Favreau’s Lion King did what it was supposed to do: $543 domestic and more than a billion abroad. It probably would’ve made even more if it had been any good at all.
The Lion King had long been one of the most valuable items in Disney’s whole collection of valuable items. Back in 1994, the original had been a happy surprise smash. While most of Disney’s big guns worked on Pocahontas, the company also made an 88-minute musical about big cats fighting each other and singing Elton John songs. The first Lion King—an original story, though it heavily ripped off the ’60s anime series Kimba The White Lion, as well as Hamlet—came out in the midst of Disney’s fabled Renaissance. It did huge business in theaters, more than any non-Forrest Gump picture that year. It also tattooed itself on the consciousness of a few different generations in ways that Forrest Gump could never even approach.
For anyone who was not yet a fully-grown adult when The Lion King first came to theaters—and for plenty of people who were—the movie became a part of a shared cultural experience, an endless source for quotes and memes and jokes. It left an impression, and Disney did a whole lot to turn that imagination real estate into cold hard cash. The Lion King spun off a diamond-selling soundtrack album, two hugely successful straight-to-video sequels, a couple of TV series, and a Broadway show that’s been a consistent goldmine for the company, as well as all the stuffed toys and theme-park attractions that you’d expect for a Disney hit. A Lion King remake was inevitable. It was always going to happen. Nothing could stop it.
Nobody can properly judge the 2019 Lion King as a discrete, self-contained work of art because it never even attempts to work as one. Instead, it remains slavishly, stultifyingly devoted to the 1994 original, to the point where it repeats camera shots and verbatim dialogue exchanges. (Lion King remake screenwriter Jeff Nathanson, who’d previously scripted things like Catch Me If You Can and the two Rush Hour sequels, must’ve had the easiest job in the world. It’s practically a control-C/control-V gig.) But because its CGI animals are made to look as realistic as possible, the remake loses all the stylized silliness that gave the original its most purely fun moments. The 2019 Lion King is a cartoon without any cartoony qualities. It’s a kid’s movie that pretends to be a documentary. For all the millions that went into making The Lion King, the fundamental idea of the thing is so strange and redundant that it’s almost avant-garde. It answers the question that nobody asked: What if we took this beloved nugget of childhood memories and made it boring?
The Lion King is half an hour longer than the original. It feels like it’s twice as long. The additions—the long lyrical interludes, the deeply unmemorable Beyoncé song—add nothing. But what really makes the remake drag is the way it rips out all the physical vitality. Beholden to a concept of realism, the computer-generated animals of the remake simply can’t express themselves in the ways that the hand-drawn shapes of the original could. The special-effects lions do look cool and realistic; lions themselves are fun to watch, and the technical expertise that went into the movie is just baffling. (When I rewatched the remake a few nights ago, one of my cats was absolutely hypnotized, which has to be a sign of a good special-effects illusion.) Every individual strand of hair must’ve taken untold hours to render, and there’s a certain stoner majesty to some of the sequences. But once the initial shock of these realistic animals wears off, you’re left with an entire cast of characters that can’t visibly emote.
It’s possible to imagine a Lion King remake that would do weird things with the original. If the movie version had involved puppets, like Julie Taymor’s wildly popular Broadway adaptation, then that could’ve been a way to discover some new sense of life in the material. But that would’ve been weird and risky, and Disney isn’t particularly into weird or risky. Instead, the company turned the project over to Jon Favreau, who’d come out of indie comedies and into the world of efficiently managed special-effects blockbusters.
Favreau had made Disney a lot of money with The Jungle Book, but that had been a little looser with its source material, and looseness was not the goal with The Lion King. The Jungle Book also had one human character that could anchor all the digital stuff happening. The Lion King doesn’t have human characters. It has animals who act human. The remake takes those animals and removes their human characteristics, which makes watching the movie an oddly cold and alienating task. You can’t latch onto anybody. For all the virtuosity of the animation, you can’t even tell the characters apart sometimes.
The musical numbers have no swirling bold colors, no impossible choreography. Instead, they just sit there. We watch as animals calmly roam across the screen. The moments of cartoon logic from the original—lightning striking a tree and causing a fire during a climactic confrontation— seem absurd when presented as something other than a cartoon. Without the charisma of those drawings, the storytelling becomes harder to buy, too. A young Simba, for instance, seems a whole lot dumber for trusting his obviously malevolent uncle Scar after Scar has knowingly sent him into danger. If Simba is immature, The Lion King works. If he’s simply an idiot, it becomes harder to empathize.
The decisions that went into the Lion King remake all make sense on paper. The original had way too many white people in the cast, so the remake is full of Black actors, many of whom are generational figures. But since the actors couldn’t add anything beyond their voices—no motion-capture was involved—they don’t really get to add much personality. Donald Glover, cruising on a couple of huge years, sleepwalks his way through the lead role. (He was a lot more charming promoting the film on the talk-show circuit, dressing in a lion suit and pretending that he’d been shooting on location.) Beyoncé, always a wooden actor, is simply a distracting presence whenever she’s not singing. Chiwetel Ejiofor, hampered by boring realism, never gets to chew scenery the way Jeremy Irons did in the original. An 86-year-old James Earl Jones rumbles out his old lines without the energy that he’d shown 25 years earlier. The film does none of them any favors. Only Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen, as Timon and Pumba, get a chance to riff, and they make the most of it. When they first appear, the film briefly threatens to come alive. It never quite happens.
Four months after The Lion King opened in theaters, the Disney+ streaming service launched with the premiere of Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian. That show kicks ass. It’s already had a much greater cultural impact than the Lion King remake, with Favreau reminding the world that he can do beautiful things with long-established cultural properties, as long as he has room to play around. The Lion King gave Favreau none of that room.
In its misbegotten drive to show off special-effects wizardry while otherwise declining to mess with its source material, The Lion King speaks to something dark at the heart of blockbuster filmmaking. It’s not that the people who make movies have run out of ideas. It’s that new ideas are simply not as lucrative as familiar images presented in familiar ways. A movie like Avengers: Endgame takes unpredictable left turns, but it depends entirely on the viewer’s familiarity with its characters. The Lion King remake also depends on that familiarity, but it removes the unpredictable left turns, leaving nothing. In its witless and numbing repetition, it might be the ultimate late-era blockbuster—the most representative example of that last little run before people, through habit and necessity, stopped going to the movies entirely. If the movie business, in its current form, is about to die, then it won’t just be the pandemic that killed it. The rote joylessness of spectacles like The Lion King will have a lot to answer for, too.
The contender: Toy Story 4 was pretty good, right? It’s been a little weird to see molded plastic representation of a doodled-on spork for sale at Target, since the entire idea of the Forkie character is that he’s a piece of repurposed trash given life by love and imagination. But don’t hate the player. Hate the game.
Next time: The big asterisk year. A global pandemic shuts down theaters in March and then turns all attempts to reopen into flaming disasters, threatening the entire already-tenuous existence of moviegoing culture. The would-be blockbusters all get pushed to later dates or dumped onto streaming services. Through a quirk of timing, the random-ass January release of Bad Boys For Life turns out to be the last hit standing. Shit just got a little too real.
386 Comments
Do you think Jon Favreau knows what a soulless piece of garbage this movie is? Or does he really think it’s worth something?
An essential question. He knows. It was a stepping stone to other, better work.
He had to do this to get in for the Mandalorian, I’m thinking
I think we need to wait for Chef 2 to find out what he thinks of that whole period.
This time Dustin Hoffman’s character is an allegory for remaking ‘classic’ Disney properties.
Dustin Hoffman just tried to grope Snow White
Dustin Hoffman screamed at Snow White between takes and threw his lunch at her “to get a better performance out of her.”
Very much so, yes.
Given his work on The Mandalorian at the same time – which is clearly something he’s passionate about – I wonder how much involvement he had in this outside of recording the actors and approving rough footage. The whole thing plays like a soulless tech demonstration. It makes sense that the chief creative behind it was distracted elsewhere.
I’ve seen the tears on his pillow. He knows.
What tears? I think Favreau knew exactly what he was doing. Getting to play with cutting edge technology for a huge paycheck, finished results be damned.
Same with the Aladdin remake. Good or bad, a Guy Ritchie movie used to actually look like a Guy Ritchie movie. That was the only film of his that’s completely bland and anonymous. I wouldn’t be surprised if he went back to making street-level crime films as penance.
I’m still waiting for Bit o’ Bovva to come out on Blu-Ray.
The Aladdin remake could have benefitted from a heist, a few twisty double-crosses, and an abundance of Cockney rhyming slang.
“One jump ahead of the breadline, one swing ahead of the sword
I steal only what I can’t afford—‘n’ that’s everything, innit?”
Favreau has about the most interesting filmography out there for any director of his generation, and even most of his mega budget projects feature interesting, three-dimensional characters. I think it was just an impossibility with Lion King, so he did a professional’s work and took his check.
Hollywood history is full of movies that everyone thought were shit until they went into post production, and vice versa. I’m not saying this wasn’t a cash grab, but I don’t think creators are lying when they say “hey what do I know?”
Jon Favreau’s job was to make a CGI version of The Lion King that would make money. It made money. More importantly, Jon Favreau made money, and he will continue to make money that he can enjoy with his family. Why would he care whether it’s soulless? Do you care if whatever you make or do at work is soulless?Also, too many adults watched this movie and rolled their eyes at how much it sucked, because they were kids when they saw the original traditionally animated Lion King. When my kids saw the remake on Disney Plus and wanted to watch it, my wife and I hastened to show them the original, to make sure that was their first experience with the movie. They liked it. Then they were like, “Okay, so can we watch the live action one?” They liked that one too. They didn’t think the remake was soulless garbage, they thought it was cool to see the same basic story redone in “live action.” They were the real audience for this movie.
“It made money” and “children like it”? Talk about damning with faint praise.
Do you care if whatever you make or do at work is soulless?Uh, yes, I do.
I think he saw it as a cool tech experiment and I think to some degree a lot of the criticism of it is based on failing to totally get what he was doing creatively with it. I haven’t watched the whole thing, but I watched a clip of ‘I Just Can’t Wait To Be King’ from it once, and what immediately came to mind while watching it was ‘The Adventures of Milo & Otis.’ So I think Favreau was trying to evoke the way in some of the old Disney animal documentaries they’d shoot a bunch of footage and then cut it together and dub over it to make up a narrative, instead of just being raw animal footage and commentary. So I think from that perspective he views it as an artistic success because at least it was trying to be something different from the source. It would’ve been easy to do The Lion King as a 3D CG picture with squash and stretch and smears and all the normal animation techniques that go into making animated characters expressive. But it also would’ve been even more pointless to do.
I don’t really think there’s a lot of value in commending an artist for doing what they set out to do. If I watch a movie and I’m bored by it, I’m not any less bored by knowing that the artist achieved their goal. Good for them, I guess, but I was still bored.
I think he made tens of millions from its release and doesn’t give half a shit.
I rewatched the original for the first time in years not long after this film came out and loved it. It’s a relatively simple story, but it’s really beautifully told.I saw this because the trailers made it seem like it could be worth the time and money. But wow, what a soulless, mind-numbing, borderline-forgettable experience it was. And what a waste of potential, too – recasting for people of colors in the roles was great, but none of them really stood out. (Just on a purely artistic level, Chiwetel Ejiofor never even comes close to competing with Jeremy Irons’s performance.)Also, the soundtrack is arguably Hans Zimmer’s best, and he totally deserved that Oscar. I never fail to get chills when breaking this out.
It’s amazing how tight Disney animation storytelling could be during the comeback period. Beauty and the Beast doesn’t waste a moment and accomplishes so much. It’s not totally surprising coming in the wake of a decade of ‘80s genre movies that often got you out of the theater after 105 minutes tops, though there were plenty of 2-hour-plus titles too. These remakes definitely reflect how much more bloated tentpole filmmaking in general has become since then.
I remember rewatching Beauty and the Beast after the remake and boy the pacing is rock solid. There is not a minute wasted, it never feels like its rushing or dragging. Its only 84 minutes and it’s just perfect.
Even more amazing, just about everyone who’s made a Beauty and the Beast movie has reported that the whole middle section is incredibly hard to make interesting since it’s so dramatically inert. Their solution was to go hard on making a bunch of fun castle staff to keep attention going, and it worked beautifully.
Yep. Even the Jean Coctau film sags a little in the middle. 1991 Beauty and the Beast is a perfect example of consistently good pacing.
There’s a reason the original soundtrack/score album went however-many-times platinum. It’s simply gorgeous and thrilling, start to finish.
The premise of this feature is looking back “at the highest grossing movie in America from every year since 1960” … except when we don’t feel like it.
The first Lion King—an original story, though it heavily ripped off the ’60s anime series Kimba The White Lion, as well as Hamlet—came out in the midst of Disney’s fabled Renaissance. Last I checked Simba does not carry around the pelt of Mufasa and talk to him like he’s still alive, convinces all the carnivores in the Pridelands to eat vegetables and stop eating meat, and isn’t trying to make all of his subjects act more like humans in order to “civilize” them like in Kimba…While it’s almost certainly likely that the creators of Lion King had heard of Kimba and might have been subconsciously influenced by it, it’s more a matter of there being over 10+ hours of Kimba content (Most of which either have little to no resemblence to the elements of Lion King or came out well after Lion King and therefore ripped Disney off.) so of course a handful of it will vaguely resemble stuff from the Lion King. due to the law of averages becuase there’s only so many stories you can tell about talking lions in Africa.Hell, the only reason “Kimba” sounds like “Simba” is because simba is the Swahili word for lion. When Jungle Emperor Leo, which is what Kimba is called in Japan, was dubbed over in the US they initially wanted to change Leo’s name to “Simba” but worried they wouldn’t be able to trademark the name if it’s just a generic work so they just swapped out the “S” with a “K”.
I was about to say. Everytime Kimba comes up in conversation I genuinely wonder if they’ve seen Kimba. The comparisons between the two are skin deep at best.
I grew up watching the original series (in RERUNS, dammit) and never had any idea what those people were talking about. I didn’t know until tonight that there was a Simba film made AFTER The Lion King that people are ignorantly or willfully conflating with the original.
You mean pelt deep?
Thanks for this comment, I hope that video eventually murders that bit of “folk wisdom” completely.
Here in the UK there’s a cartoon from the 50s that most people of a certain age will tell you for a fact had characters with names like “Master Bates” and “Seaman Staines” even though that can easily be disproven by, you know, watching the actual show for 5 minutes. I don’t think people really care that it’s not true, for some reason a lot of people out there delight in the idea of seemingly innocent children’s entertainment having a smutty or tawdry “dark side”. I think the same applies to the SimbaKimba controversy, I don’t think most people who spread it are interested in exploring the actual evidence.
Yeah—look I am a huge anime/manga fan, and I worship a lot of Osamu Tezuka’s work. In the 80s I grew up on Canadian TV reruns of the 80s Astro Boy and the original Kimba and loved both (though admittedly I only remember aspects of either). And obviously at least some of the Disney people were aware of Kimba and there was some influence there. But, despite how popular it’s become to call Lion King a full on rip off… It simply isn’t.
(I personally think there’s a lot more of a connection between Laputa Castle in the Sky, and Nadia The Secret of Blue Water–which sorta is a complicated history rip off of Laputa itself–and Disney’s Atlantis…)
It’s also not really Hamlet. It’s kind of a prequel to Hamlet and then the last act if the last act of Shakespeare’s tragedy had been setup on a much dumber lie.
There’s a pretty good video talking about all of the issues with calling Lion King a 1:1 adaptation of Hamlet.
Esp. since Scar doesn’t bang Simba’s mom, and Simba doesn’t die at the end.
Simba never considers suicide. How would a lion even do that? Maybe he’d offer himself to some crocodiles, then Rafiki stops him? “That’s the king you’re eating!”
Yeah. Hamlet of course too is all about Hamlet trying to deal with the fact about whether he SHOULD kill his uncle or not. There’s never any of that weighing down Simba.
My gripe with the original Lion King is that it felt like a rip off of Bambi.I only heard about the Kimba stuff later and that seemed to take more precedence over Disney ripping themselves off.Also I think Lion King is a tiny bit overrated. Of the films released during ‘Disney Renaissance’ period, I’d rate Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast over it.Anyhoo I had no interest in watching this CGI remake and it’s doesn’t seem like I missed out on anything (bar a more Afro-centric cast).
Calling it a Bambi rip-off actually has more weight to it than being a Kimba rip-off since the animators jokingly called The Lion King “Bamblet” during preproduction.
The original internal nickname for the film was Bambi in Africa so your not wrong. I myself think its a good film but Beauty and the Beast is better by a solid margin.
“ Also I think Lion King is a tiny bit overrated. Of the films released
during ‘Disney Renaissance’ period, I’d rate Aladdin and Beauty and the
Beast over it.”I really loathe The Lion King. I think it’s a mistake to look too deeply at what movies like Aladdin or Beauty and the Beast are trying to say, but Lion King is so damn self serious it invites a harder look.
It wants you to connect its vision of Lion Kings to the real world in a way Little Mermaid really doesn’t expect you to think too hard about Ariel’s dad. And its messages are just awful.
If you’ve not seen it already, you
might enjoy Big Joel’s video on that, where he discusses how bringing
in this ‘realistic’ serious aesthetic to TLK inherently problematises
morals and ideas we were able to accept* as ‘true for the space of
this fairytale; not one-on-one with rl morality’ in the original
*with exceptions!
I read that as Billy Joel.
I rate Disney movies by how meme-worthy they are and I don’t think any of them even touches The Lion King in memes.seriously, though, the songs are upbeat and catchy and very easy to whistle or hum and it has a sweet love song to boot. The score is superb and the voice work by the likes of James Earle Jones, Jeremy Irons and Nathan Lane are both fantastic and highly quotable. The story is also drastically different from the usual princess type fare, even if it is inspired by Hamlet.
I love Beauty and the Beast but I think Lion King scores more points overall.
I agree that it’s a bit overrated among those films. Lion King was pitched at Disney and referred to there, when they were making it, as Bambi in Africa, so that connection was intentional. *edit* and I see everyone else has made the same point…
Also I think Lion King is a tiny bit overrated.Agreed 100%. It’s a fun movie that has a handful of scenes that really work, but Simba is a bit too passive as the protagonist and there’s a couple of annoying plot problems and idiot balls that keep me from fully investing in the film. Out of the ten Disney Renaissance films, I’d rank it 7th.
I enjoyed the scenes with Scar and the hyenas more than the ones with Zumba tbh. I just can’t resist a hammy Jeremy Irons performance (well, the DND movie being an exception). “Circle of Life” was meh, but “Be Prepared” was a riot.
Jeremy Irons and animator Andreas Deja elevating Scar into the pantheon of classic Disney villains is one of most enjoyable parts of the movie for me, as well.
Also, you see, Kimba is a white lion, whereas Simba is yellowish-tan.
If Disney had the guts to go that far with Mufasa’s corpse I’d admire that
I’m thinking there’s a lot of Berenstain Bears/Sinbad starring as a genie named “Shazam” effect going on here.
It’s less the Mandela Effect and more it’s talking lions in Africa with protagonists who have similar names and people cherry picking evidence for Disney ripping off Tezuka since Kimba has over 50+ hours of media surrounding the character ;so law of averages dictates that at least some of it will vaguely resemble scenes or characters from the Lion King because there’s only so many stories you can tell about talking lions in Africa.
there’s only so many stories you can tell about talking lions in Africa.Says you. There may be “talking lion in Africa Hamlet-but-with-happy-ending” riffs, but I bet no one has done a “talking lion in Africa but it’s actually a Taxi Driver” riff. At least not until I finish my script.
Simba will be wishing for a real rain to wash these hyena scum off the savanna?
I’m not a Disney apologist, so….There are enough similarities that, “skin-deep” or not, Der Maus would’ve had a hard time proving their allegations that nobody, but nobody working on The Lion King had ever heard of either JUNGLE EMPEROR LEO or its U.S. adaption KIMBA, THE WHITE LION. It’s not that one work was “inspired” by another that’s the issue, it’s that Disney launched into a cover-up by denying it — the same way they slagged Scarlett Johansson over their own Day&Date plans after not sitting down with her first!Disney could save itself a world of hurt in both cases by admitting that, yes, there is some justice in the allegations but there are also substantial differences (as you’ve pointed out), and they’d be happy to negotiate in good faith to reach an agreement. Instead, they fly off the handle like Trump Hillary a spoiled child, blaming everybody but themselves for what caused the issue in the first place….
You do realize that Tezuka Productions and even Tezuka’s own son have said that they two different stories with two different themes right? Hell, Tezuka’s son has even said that he doesn’t like people using his father’s work as a means to bash Disney (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimba_the_White_Lion#The_Lion_King_controversy).Is it possible that some of the people working on the Lion King had heard of Kimba? Yes. Is it possible that some of the animators subconsciously were influenced by Kimba? Yes. Was it stupid for Disney to claim that none of the people who worked on The Lion King had ever even heard of Kimba? Yes.But any similarities between the Lion King and Kimba are skin deep at best and mostly have to do with the latter having 50+ hours of media so of course some visuals between the Lion King and Kimba will look vaguely similar because there’s only so many stories you can tell about talking animals in Africa without there being some overlap in terms of setting and animals used. Disney is not a good company, but let’s find actual reasons to criticize them that have merit.
Disney could save itself a world of hurt in both cases by admitting that, yes, there is some justice in the allegations but there are also substantial differences (as you’ve pointed out), and they’d be happy to negotiate in good faith to reach an agreement.There is nothing to negotiate if the film does not actually plagiarize Jungle Emperor/Kimba. It’s perfectly fine for a movie to take inspiration from previous work, and it doesn’t seem like whatever influence it may have had was in any way major, even admitting every possible point. And since Tezuka and the Kimba rights holders take the same view, there is no need to “reach an agreement”: the two sides already agree.
Not sure what you’re referring to as a “cover-up” either. Did Disney ever try to claim that nobody involved in the production had ever heard of Kimba? As far as I can tell, the two directors said they hadn’t seen it, and dismissed the parallels as coincidences.
Huh, I thought that throwaway line about Kimba was in there just to head off the inevitable internet chorus of “Yeah, but it’s a rip-off!” I honestly never realized the prevailing online opinion had shifted so far around to the other side.
I wonder what other “actually—” opinions have changed.
Are Nikolai Tesla and Hedy Lamarr still considered genius inventors?
It’s more that people started looking into the claim rather than just rely on superficial similarities and hearsay.
I’m curious as to what the next regular feature will be, now that Popcorn Champs is all but caught up and A History Of Violence has run out.
Movies for Moggie’s: How will Tom Breihan’s cats rate these cinema classics?
Popcorn Chumps, which looks at the lowest rated, lowest grossing films that received a major theatrical released each year.
Good idea! Or Biggest Loser – which movie lost the most money in any year.
I like that! Or Popcorn Chimps – looking into the highest grossing, best reviewed monkey movie from each year.You will cover Most Vertical Primate, AV Club! You will!
I can’t wait for the Reagan one
So…a revival of My Year of Flops, but in chronological order?
That would go over about as well as a Disney live-action remake. Un. Necessary.
It may be providing them with WAY more stock than they’re due – but a bi-weekly review of the Razzie worst picture winner through the years.Comparing it to the other nominated, is it really the worst movie of the year, has it any redeeming qualities/has it aged well, career impact of those involved. Etc etc.
I Have Confidence, tracing musicals from the 1940s to the present?
Why skip the 30s?
Fair enough, there are some fun musicals in the 1920s and 30s but I feel the 40s is when they hit there stride. Alternatively a series about animated films starting with Snow White and going through today would be fun.
I guess I was thinking how the 30s do have a handful of IMHO the best movie musicals of all time—Rouben Mamoulian’s pre-code Love Me Tonight, with an original Rodgers and Hart score, is rightfully now considered one of the greatest, best integrated musicals ever (that opening sequence is just *wow*). James Whale’s Show Boat was the first great stage to screen musical adaptation and the first film musical to tackle serious subject matter (sure some of it is problematic to watch now, though much less than you’d expect—this isn’t Gone with the Wind or Song of the South). The Astaire/Rogers films for RKO… It would seem a shame to completely miss all that.
I’d be keen on an animated series although if they were going for highest grossing animated film each year, even if we included Japan from the 60s on, that would still mean it would be heavily dominated by Disney.
I always think James Whales Show Boat is 1940 on the dot. Love that show. When I think 30s musical I think of 34th Street or Gold Diggers, which at least gave us Ginger Rogers singing We’re In the Money.
A History of Violence still adds new entries at the end of each year.
My nomination: The King (Of Monsters) And I — Get a kaiju fan to do deep-dives on Godzilla movies from 1954 to the present.
AV Club powers-that-be, I’m on Twitter and my DMs are open.
Maybe they’ll bring back Hatesong
My heart would love a look at each Best Picture winner. My head says that AV Club will realise they can’t spin these longform, deep dives into repetitive spin-off posts (Reactions / Roundtable / For Our Consideration) whoch just repeat the same content for clicks and just cans them. I hope my head is wrong.
I’d like the Best Picture one too. In college I made a project of seeing every Best Picture winner to date (and I’ve managed to keep up, although I still haven’t seen Moonlight or Green Book… apparently I have a problem with Mahershala Ali?), and it was fascinating to see some of these movies which won and were huge deals in the 1950s and 1960s and which nobody seems to give a crap about any more, while others maintain substantial popularity to this day. E.g. I really liked Gentleman’s Agreement, but these days it has no popular standing outside of film buff circles.
As a column, a lot of it would really only be of interest to film history buffs. Almost none of the A.V. Club’s readership is likely to have seen Cimarron or How Green Was My Valley, which severely limits how much discussion there can be (and how much interest the average reader might have in even reading articles about BP winners from 70 years ago they haven’t seen).An approach with slightly broader appeal might be to review the BP nominees from each year and see which ones have stood the test of time and would be considered the actual best of that year; Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon were both nominated the year that How Green Was My Valley won, for example.
That’s an awesome idea but it would take Tom’s workload from close to 100 films to about 500.I’m not saying he shouldn’t do it though
The ultimate argument for a cinephile. What is the worst Best Picture winner?
Green BookCrashDances with WolvesChariots of FireKramer vs. KramerMaybe I should drop Dances With Wolves. It’s awfully dull, but at least the photography is beautiful.
I would also add 1952s Greatest Show on Earth and 1956s Around the World in 80 Days. Those two are dreadful.
I made rankings of each Best Picture winner as I was watching them. (List last updated in 2014.) The one I put at the very bottom was The Broadway Melody, which was just boring. In fact most of the ones at the bottom of the list were ones I found boring or just dated and archaic: Cimarron, Going My Way, Grand Hotel, How Green Was My Valley. To be fair it’s not really reasonable to expect that a movie made in like 1931 is going to be a big hit with someone born in 1977.But there’s some that, while still popular, I disliked for one reason or another. An American in Paris is still generally well-considered, but while I found most of the movie reasonably amusing, I hated the ending dance hallucination sequence so much that I shoved the movie down to the bottom of the list.
I did to. I know people love the ending but its just goodish dancing for half an hour. Its no Singing in the Rain.
Ooh, what was the oldest best picture you ranked the highest?
Casablanca was ranked first. The next movie of that era to rank highly was Rebecca (7th), and then It Happened One Night is 18th. The Best Years of Our Lives was 23rd. Most of the films prior to 1960 or so are skewed lower on the list.
But keep in mind that I did most of these rankings over 20 years ago, and I’d probably rank a lot of the BP winners differently now (although Casablanca would still be, and always will be, first). And the rankings were purely based on how much I enjoyed watching the movie; I didn’t attempt to use any kind of objective or academic criteria.
Best Years of Our Lives is so good and it doesn’t remotely feel like its from the 1940s. It has the introspection you expect from a film talking about events decades ago. But it was made in 1946, when the world was still cheering about beating nazis. Its truly unique.
Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. It struck me at the time I saw it (in college, in a film class, about 25 years ago) how melancholy and non-rah-rah it was. One guy has hooks for hands! One guy is suicidal! Even the guy with a good family life to come back to is still haunted by war! It’s not exactly bleak but it really flew in the face of the Team USA vibe most WW2 media had.
Yeah the guy with PTSD, the one who’s an alcoholic, the wounded veteran who feels less human. Some of these people have loving families and some don’t. It doesn’t even try to valorize the hell these people went through, it forces the watcher to look at what war does people and silently asks is it worth it? That’s daring to say even now but in 1946 it was like seeing life on Mars. The guy without hands won an Oscar for his role, he sold in sometime later to make ends meet.
yeah my head says ‘oh you’re the last regular column and now it’s done, bye’
A History of Horror, certainly.
Or Sci-Fi Champs
October would be a good time for a horror one to start
It’s an appropriate bookend to the soulless, joyless Rise of Skywalker.I’m increasingly starting to suspect JJ Abrams, though he might be a nice guy personally, is one of the worst things to ever happen to cinema.
He seems to be a great producer.He really, really, REALLY needs to stop writing and directing things.
So, essentially George Lucas
Nah. George Lucas has original thoughts and is an innovator from top to bottom, even when his movies don’t work. J.J. Abrams’s most original idea was to ape the biggest American auteur of the late-20th century.
Like, has anyone EVER, ONCE, claimed the prequels were derivative or they were just a “worse version of X”?
Unimaginative or uncreative George Lucas most certainly is NOT.
What the fuck nonsense is this
George Lucas will make a worse film, but you’ll sure as hell remember it. I think that says more than competent but unoriginal.
The original Star Wars is really good. Did Abrams ever direct anything comparable?
I guess The Force Awakens is the literal answer to your question? 😀
Comparable in that it’s obviously a shallow imitation by somebody who doesn’t understand what made the original work, yes.
I really loved Super 8 though.
the only thing I remember about Super 8 was that Abrams managed to use a fucking lens flare in a pitch black scene.
I get thinking that he uses it too much but that being the only thing you notice sounds like a personal problem
Is he a good producer, though? The Force Awakens and Star Trek 2009 worked well enough at the time (by the time I realised the cracks in the structure, it was long enough after to get away with it) but his follow ups to these films were catastrophic (he seems to have no understanding of distances in space and their scale for starters).Then with Star Wars, he didn’t push hard enough for his (or any ideas really) to be carried forward (also an issue with the other producers and Kathleen Kennedy really if no-one else should have done something) but failing to do that for/with Rian Johnson, then at the very least JJ Abrams and the rest of the team should have had the sense to follow at least some of his ideas to a realistic conclusion instead of reversing *every* single one no matter how much whiplash the U-turn caused (especially Rey from someone? to no-one to SOME ONE).Lack of imagination and sheer cowardice of the highest order by him here with The Rise of Skywalker.(Rey or Kylo become the villain of the last film or at least something/anything even remotely daring and not a rote dull inferior retread of what went before.)
Fair points.I think he’s a good producer in that I think he’s best involved in the background, hiring young new talent, offering the occasional creative suggestion, etc. I get the impression he helps make sets a pleasant place to work, and that’s not nothing. And with his experience and clout, he’s great at getting other projects off the ground and then leaving all the actual creative stuff to others better suited to it (like Lost).I guess what I’m trying to say is…I think he needs to stick to more background elements, which seems to be more his forte. (Whereas his understanding of narrative is absolutely atrocious.)
I still can’t get over “A supernova will explode, threatening to destroy the galaxy.”
Is there anything to the idea that Star Wars itself may be the problem? That its fanbase and canon are locked in a dance of death? Consider that SW is only good without baggage. It’s the Oscar hosting of the movie world.
I know he signed a gigantic overall deal with somebody (Warner?) a while back, but I think it’s pretty telling that since RoS there has been very little talk of “What’s Abrams’ next project?” Even with the pandemic putting a pause on the industry, you would expect there to be some speculation or news about Bad Robot’s production slate and which project JJ would be taking the reins on next. The tepid box office, critical and fan response to Episode IX may have finally exposed him as the Don Draper of Hollywood: a very savvy pitchman who only enjoys the beginning of things.
Abrams has been tapped by WB to make movies out of the Justice League Dark characters and I’m REALLY dreading what comes out of that, especially for Zatanna.
Heres a fun argument, which is worse? Beauty and the Beast or Lion King? Remakes of course I mean. I’d say Beauty and the Beast, the original film is almost perfect and Emma Watsons singing is astonishingly bad. Both films are something you couldn’t pay me to watch again, they are utterly worthless. At least Gus Vant Sant had an artistic reason to do a shot for shot Psycho remake. Just think about that. Psycho 1998 has more artistic value then a pair of Disney live action remakes that made over one billion dollars. Goddamn it.
I’m… not sure. I actually like Beauty and the Beast (original) more than Lion King which for whatever reason, ever since I was a kid was my least fave of the Disney renaissance musicals (I preferred all the Alan Menken ones—yes, including Pocahontas). I do like some of the performances in Beauty and the Beast like Luke Evans. I love Alan Menken’s new score (I mean *score*–I think his new songs are predictably OK if not essential and like many others it’s odd that these remakes don’t just use the added Broadway songs). And I guess I would rather rewatch it than the new Lion King, but… Yeah it’s not good (and I tend to always want to give the benefit of the doubt to Bill Condon because *some* of his movies, going back to Gods and Monsters, are favouritesof mine.)
Gods and Monsters was genuinely great, I don’t know what happened to Condon. Disney money is one hell of a drug.
See also: the director of Moonlight and If Beale Street Could talk taking on… a prequel to the Lion King remake.
He also got sucked into Twilight, no? (But I can’t say if he did a good job there or not, as I’ve not seen them…) I thought his work with Dreamgirls was overall good and showed he could handle a big musical (the director’s cut–which keeps a lot more of the stage show’s structure of being mostly sung through with little dialogue–works much better). But it’s true that Beauty and the Beast has absolutely no real style.
That’s such a funny last name. I know a guy with that last name that knocked a girl up. His Condon broke
Alan Menken is a talented composer, but Howard Ashman was the key to the Disney Renaissance. His death was in itself a tragedy, but it was also a huge loss for fans of Disney’s animated musicals.
I thought the “Evermore” song they added was actually pretty good and was a worthy addition. Especially in light of The Lion King remake removing its spectacularly good villain song, there’s no contest here.
Yeah I like Evermore (though I’m not sure if it’s any better than If I Can’t Love Her from the stage version) and have no objection really to any of the new songs. Menken’s work on these remakes IMHO is beyond criticism–there’s no need for his additions but he at least feels committed and not just selling it in (even if I have to admit I don’t think he’s the songwriter that he was back in the 80s and 90s). And his incidental score for Aladdin also, actually, is a great reworking.
Its aggressively strange that all the new songs basically fill a gap from the Broadway show but are worse. All I can fathom is Oscar potential, thats it
Right but even then you’d think they’d consider incorporating at least one of the songs from the stage versions. (Little Mermaid was not a success on Broadway though has been lucrative for Disney since then, but one of its better aspects were some of the new songs–but again, for the upcoming movie, all the non animated film songs are going to be brand new, with Lin-Manuel lyrics, no less.)
Which, speaking of – I recall really liking “He Lives In You” from the Broadway version of The Lion King – why not pull that into the movie!
For The Lion King I will forever be baffled that they had Beyonce playing Nala – who would have sung an absolutely phenomenal “Shadowland” (the best “new” song in the Broadway version) – they gave her nothing. Sure she sings a bit of her new song “Spirit” later in the film, but it’s Beyonce! She can have more than one song!As for The Little Mermaid the only “new” song I remember standing out from that mess was Prince Eric’s “Her Voice.” I genuinely enjoy Lin-Manuel Miranda, so I’m interested to see what he comes up with.And with Beauty and the Beast I was initially mortified they didn’t include “Home,” but thinking about how Emma Watson would have butchered it makes me think we dodged a bullet.
Be Our Guest was AWFUL!
The Lion King is worse. And I wasn’t even completely against it. I love the original and was intrigued about taking something like that and changing the aesthetic and seeing what difference it made to how it felt. Not dissimilar to the Psycho remake (even if that wasn’t the aim behind this). And The Jungle Book had been surprisingly good. But then it started and the Circle of Life stuff looked amazing… but was off. There was no warmth (where was the hug between Mufassa and Rafiki?). The beat of the title line was changed for no reason. And these are small things but as the rest of the film played out, it was evident it was a sign of things to come. No warmth. No soul. Changes for no reason other than to put a duller stamp on it. No personality because these lions are far too real to do anything remotely human. A half assed, obligatory Be Prepared replacing the great animated version. Imagine the nazi hyena march with this technology on a grandiose scale. Imagine the psychedelic colours of the original I Just Can’t Wait to Be King with this technology instead of the dull orange flat landscape version. Imagine a Can You Feel the Love Tonight that wasn’t set in the fucking afternoon. Someone said that it felt like a nature documentary that had been dubbed over and that’s pretty accurate. When Mufassa dies in the original it’s heartbreaking. When he dies in this one – falling back, crying “Nooooooo!” – it’s hilarious. (That’s twice James Earl Jones has revisited a character decades later and added an embarrassing “Nooooooo!” to their legacy). It took something with such life, personality, creativity, character and fun and stripped it all down to say “Look what our software can do”. Even the actors sounded like they were doing their lines with a knowing smirk of how dumb it was. Anyway, Beaury and the Beast has Luke Evans as (and singing) Gaston and thus wins by default.
Wow, he did the Noooo again?! This is actually the third time, they dubbed in a bad Noooo into the climax of Return of the Jedi on the Blu Ray version, utterly ruining it.
Luke, while a great actor/singer just doesn’t do it for me as a big giant blowhard. Can John Cena or Channing Tatum sing?
I thought Evans was great but the idea of Cena as Gaston is incredible.
I haven’t seen the Lion King remake yet, but it seems that it adheres so close to the original that there’s not a lot to complain about beyond “why does this exist?”Beauty and the Beast I did see and did not like. A lot of it felt like they looked at the “Headscratchers” page on TVTropes and tried to address every single concern people had about the original (like, where’s Mr. Potts? Why were the servants cursed too?). Lindsay Ellis did a great video tearing this whole thing down.
Yeah its like theybl forgot fairytales aren’t meant to be logical, they give you emotionally what you want and that’s it. It felt very Buzzfeed look at these plot holes.
i agree, b&tb is worse. they’re both ugly and bad, but lion king at least has eric andre in it.
I forgot he was in it. If he had asked Scar who killed Mufasa I’d maybe like the film a slight bit.
B&B and Aladdin just look really flat and dull, like it’s an ABC musical. All of them try to address plot holes and fan criticisms, making the movies extremely self conscious.
I can’t comment on the actual movies quality, but I can definitely say that live action B&tB is a better idea than “live action” Lion King, because at least in B&tB, there are actual actors on screen, and thus an actual reason why you’d think that might be a good idea to exist. Live action Lion King is a situation of Disney being so “preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
They would have been better off adapting the stage musical. There would be “some” justification for that. That applies to both BATB and Lion King.
I’ve heard that Taymor tried to pitch Disney an adaptation that was closer to the stage musical puppetry augmented by CGI, and they wanted nothing to do with it. I’d suppose part of that is that many of Taymor’s film directing efforts have bombed, and perhaps the high-profile mess of the Spider-Man musical on top of that. But if you’re trying to recycle your IP, that approach is at the very least interesting and expressive.
Probably Spiderman. Pity, it may be amazingly terrible but its something you will never forget unlike the remakes.
I’d argue the Lion King’s reason for being remade was just as much an artistic curiosity as Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, which is why it’s every bit the same sort of failure (even if the reasons why they are bad may vary).
But like The Jungle Book, I can marvel at the eye candy that is The Lion King’s photo-real technology. And similar to Cinderella, I can at least appreciate Beauty and the Beast’s costumes and production design. So with those, I can give them props on that level. Even Aladdin is visually lavish. and Mulan has great cinematography.
It is only Dumbo that I think has no redeeming qualities as a remake. I think there’s a reason it’s the most forgettable of the bunch.
Jungle Book was at least visually interesting, bright colors and had real people to break up the uncanny world. I think being in a jungle allows for more visual creativity than a flat, brown and green savanna too. Also the Jungle Book has been remade so many times it’s not like it’s always compared to the one Disney film
To me the sets were okay and the outfits were really underwhelming. Say what you will about Cinderella but they went all out with Sandy Powells costumes. Cate Blanchett looked like a 1950s 1920s Joan Crawford for Godsake. Emmas Belle outfit looked like a prom dress or something that would eventually appear on Bridgerton. I don’t know why this happened.
The originals mostly had Broadway singers for a reason. Emma was just out of her league
Lion King for me, but I was far more attached to Lion King as a kid than Beauty and the Beast. Hell, I didnt even remember the plot of it when I saw the remake and frankly, enjoyed it quite a bit
I was a kid/teen during the so-called Renaissance Era and the first major wave of remakes/rethinks of their older titles (i.e. 101 Dalmatians and the sequel, The Parent Trap, etc.) and with the latter, I never had much interest in them but they weren’t just scene-for-scene rehashes; they at least were trying to exploit the novelty of the medium shift and give people something different. And as you note above, some of the recent remakes have tried to do that too but the most successful ones with audiences are the totally slavish takes. I just don’t get it.
The Parent Trap is at least live-action and it’s an enduring premise, there’s plenty of room to give that to new people and see how they play it. It’s the switch from animation to live-action that really bugs me.
“The first Lion King—an original story, though it heavily ripped off the ’60s anime series Kimba The White Lion”Everybody says that but most people haven’t actually seen Kimba and I would recommend watching this video
I do not remember a single frame of this movie. Not one composition. Obviously I recall the original cartoon vividly, but this, an utter void in the memory bank. I cannot think of a more vapid piece of shit I’ve viewed in the cinemas. Not a Shark Tale Dreamworks knock-off or a Michael Bay outing comes close to this. At least those attempted something, anything. Even Beauty of the Beast or Aladdin could have conceivably been interesting exercises with humans supplanting the animations. But the Lion King’s concept was utterly flawed. There was no way any person who conceived, worked on, or saw this believed the outcome would be anything other than awful, its sole purpose then being money for the coffers of a select Disney few. Grimly, despite knowing this, many people (myself included) shrugged and bought a ticket to aid this dark process, as if it was our unavoidable lot in life to do so.
There’s a hilarious story that Scott Aukerman tells on one of his podcasts where his dad walked up to him after the Shark Tale premiere and said, “Well, that wasn’t very good, was it?
He’ll show him when his Shark Tale 2 draft gets made!
From the man who brought you “The Last Jedi: A Complete Cinematic Failure” … we have the sequel.Some highlights: Opening narration – how this film united the fanbase. The Last Jedi fans and detractors alike in collective shock and horror at the outcome.And now for some nice things he said about The Last Jedi (he liked these ideas):“The endless struggle between good and evil is an illusion worth abandoning.”“The idea that greatness can manifest in anyone even those lacking some gifted lineage.” – he liked how as he later says something like “someone from nowhere can be the equal of the great child of destiny”(found the quote about abandoning the theories of “… Rey inheriting her powers from some magic ancestor because the character with a magic lineage already exists in this franchise and his name is Kylo Ren. I rather liked how Rey was a counterpoint to Kylo showing how some backwater hick can obtain power equal to the great child of destiny.) – but then this film happened.“The idea that heroes sometimes stumble and fall and that true heroism is accepting one’s mistakes and overcoming them.”The excellent point IMO was made that like it or hate it, Rian Johnson did set up a number of ideas and many of them were worth running with and should have been committed to (the above, Rey’s parentage and lack of thereof, Kylo Ren becoming the lead villain and so on).The fact that JJ Abrams set out to directly reference and then reverse every single thing Rian Johnson did was the cinematic equivalent of a head-on car crash and just as painful to watch. Not to mention more than a bit childish.Seriously, I think most if not all of us could have planned and written something better than this.There’s no greater argument for at least planning your trilogy out with at least a few bullet points everyone agrees upon before you start making it so there’s a degree of cohesiveness across the whole enterprise.
Whoever this Vito guy is, he needs to move out of his parents’ basement and get a life.
Well, as he mentioned in that very video, his dad died during the time he was making it (videos of that size can take up to months) and he’s one of the people who actually make a living/have to make a living out of this (thank you this economy) – I think there was an explosion in people making income from Youtube videos about movies and television around the time of the release of The Last Jedi and responses to that.
I have seen that fucking thumbnail of Laura Dern, mid-face to make her look more stupid, next to the words “Complete Cinematic Failure,” so many times. And I always succeeded in avoiding the video on YouTube despite its numerous recommendations, until the day came that I actually had to watch it for work. And it was even worse than I imagined.
Well, this is Rise of Skywalker: A Complete Cinematic Failure (in effect the follow up video to The Last Jedi: A complete Cinematic Failure) which does have some defences of The Last Jedi at least insofar as saying that if you’ve given a creator the freedom to do what they want, they you should at least try to build on some of their setup/ideas instead of reversing (clumsily at best at that) every single thing that they’ve done. It also said that (as I’ve outlined), some of those ideas had potential especially since they weren’t retreading what they did before (unlike the reversals of those setups which did).
What do you do that you needed to watch an extremely long amateur Youtube movie review for work?
I was wondering that very question myself!
You need a new job. That feels like abuse.
What a disgrace. I loved him like a brother-in-law
That’s what’s so crazy about The Rise of Skywalker. It succeeds in unifying Star Wars fans by satisfying nobody. It’s like that episode of Parks and Recreation where Ron takes Diane’s daughters trick ‘r’ treating. They start fighting over a tiara, and Ron’s earnest solution is to King Solomon the tiara and say, “See? Now it’s fair!” And he thinks he’s doing the right thing. Abrams and Disney chicken out in just basic storytelling. It never ascends above the cohesion of playground fantasy improv, and all the frustrating, childish oneupmanship that comes with it. Then, they throw a bunch of Star Wars shit in a blender and go, “This is a movie, right? You love movie?” It’s just so frustrating.
Something to do with The Last Jedi, be it the content or the reaction to it definitely rattled someone at the creative level of Disney. Instead of having the courage and conviction to develop something (anything!) of the situation they were left with (and there were some places they could have gone with what they were given with a lot of potential if they tried to exhibit even a rudimentary level of skill) but instead they seem to have really panicked big time with references to things from The Last Jedi followed by immediately undoing it. Ultimately displeasing a lot of people as a result.
I actually think it would be really hilarious if Abrams and Johnson just kept on alternating Star Wars films for a while, both of them trying their hardest to reverse everything the other did.
I don’t think Johnson necessarily reversed much of what Abrams did in TFA, but he definitely took the threads left in a different (and more interesting) direction than Abrams planned. I think it would be funnier if Johnson kept building on the plot while taking it in a different direction and Abrams continually trying to reverse these changes, has only one director being pathetically slavish to their singular vision rather than both.
I cant think of another trilogy where its so clear each filmmaker doesn’t like the vision and keeps retconning the previous film. Its a thing to behold.
That’s unfair to TLJ tho’. What “vision” was there in TFA? JJ had NO answers for any of the things he teased in it. It was slavishly devoted to the plot of ANH.
TLJ actually either provided answers to much of it: Rey’s parentage, or tried to show you why it didn’t matter, like Snoke. RJ was far more interested in Kylo’s story than Snoke’s. And Kylo’s ascendance wouldn’t work if Snoke was still over him and in charge of him.
People just didn’t LIKE some of the answers he provided.
Not that the film is perfect. The mechanics of the space chase are still stupid. Finn is pretty wasted in a side-plot that has good ideas but isn’t executed well enough. And poor Rose (nothing wrong at all in introducing major characters in a part 2, see: Calrissian, Lando) is saddled with being used as Finn’s conscience and weird psuedo-love interest rather than a character in her own right most of the time. And the Holdo Poe conflcit is pretty hamfisted in how it’s done as well.
But the heart of the movie? The journeys of Rey and Kylo? Fantastic.
I dont disagree but I’m sure JJ had some idea of where he was going. Granted I bet it would be derivative and probably just ROS so I’m not crying over that loss. It’s just clear that Johnson had a different idea to take the series and while I’m not a TLJ fan, I will say whatever he was thinking of had to be better then the Emperor is back.
JJ literally had no ideas because he had no intention of returning to the franchise. He actually admitted he wasn’t sure how to incorporate Luke into the story (original writer Michael Ardnt acknowledged he struggled with the same thing), so JJ just punted, with no expectation that he’d ever have to provide any follow-up, let alone a conclusion.
His entire goal (and, arguably, Disney’s) was just to create a surface-level entertainment that did as much as possible to remind audiences of the OT to get away from the prequels.
Perhaps I’m giving him too much credit. He did admit he made shit up as he went along in Lost.
Yeah, each one is a reaction to the last. TFA was basically apologizing for the prequels, and it just kept snowballing. JJ did a great job of getting the old school look and creature design back, but he didn’t quite have the imagination Lucas did for the planets. All the planets are flat and forgettable
For months Youtube was shoving that “Last Jedi: a Complete Cinematic Failure” movie down my throat. They were trying to force me to watch that stupid video, which I never did. I don’t know why they think I’m interested in some random nerd’s opinion on Star Wars.
Do you need to post shitty YouTube videos from assholes who make shitty Star Wars thumbnails talking about how TLJ is a “total failure”? Like, you can clearly converse about TROS without posting this shit and it’s for the most part seen as the weakest in the New Trilogy so it’s not hard to make your own points.
That person posts reaction YouTube videos for a lot of shit. It’s like he doesn’t have his own opinion.
In terms of Star Wars, I think I’ve posted four. The Rise of Skywalker one here and the others in The Last Jedi article a few weeks back.The Rise of Skywalker one was as a springboard for discussion using the point that even with someone who didn’t like TLJ at all by the looks of it, they still thought there were some ideas with further potential that should not have been discarded (and especially the way they were) in The Rise of Skywalker. I think there’s been a decent discussion of that in this comment section so far, hope for more.The Last Jedi one was an addition to my comment about even though I felt Mark Hamill did an excellent performance, it wasn’t really the trajectory I would have preferred for Luke Skywalker. I get it’s possible for the young idealist to end up old, bitter and cynical but there’s enough of that in other stories and real life, not really what I want to see in a Star Wars film, just my opinion – and a springboard for discussion.Also in that same article, two videos from Robot Head, one with news footage at the time as an argument against The Empire Strikes Back getting a divisive reception and another about the bombers in The Last Jedi not making a lot of sense once you looked past the WWII aesthetic they were going for.There was also one from The Critical Drinker which was undoubtedly tongue in cheek but if you took it played straight, it made the argument that Rose Tico was a First Order spy. Even though I presume that’s actually not the case, nothing in TLJ actually contradicts that interpretation!I also mentioned but I don’t think I linked to Jay Exci’s Rise of Skywalker video and what I thought was an excellent point which was that each of the three Disney Star Wars films work better without the other two.TL;DR – I’ve posted a handful but prefacing it with my own thoughts to at least some degree and trying to reference where in the video I’m thinking there’s some alignment or at least discussion about the point I’ve raised. How successful I am each time is another question in and of itself.
This is theThe Rise of Skywalker: A Complete Cinematic Failure video, not The Last Jedi: A Complete Cinematic Failure video.I’ve summarised some key points of the compliments paid to The Last Jedi in that latter video and posted them directly below it, namely that once you had these set ups from TLJ (many of which had potential) which were interesting in their own right, it was doing an even greater disservice to what came before but not only ignoring them but visibly trying to reverse every single one.I thought it could be a useful springboard to discussion about this film from 2019 and where it went wrong the way it did. The fact it’s from such a strong detractor of TLJ doesn’t make them any less valid, if anything these are compliments about TLJ worth noting and at least discussing IMO.I did go back and look at the earlier comment section where I posted that video and I linked to it because I did want to credit someone who was articulating what I’d been thinking about Luke Skywalker, namely that even though I thought Mark Hamill had an excellent performance, that isn’t what I would have personally wanted from the character.A lot of discussion about TLJ and I think I learned a few things about TLJ as well and some very good debate was had.
The thing is: I’m taking the opinion of some chud on YouTube who hyperbolically calls TLJ “A Complete Cinematic Failure” seriously or willing to engage with anyone who posts his videos. It’s fine to not like the movie, it’s another thing to get into hyperbolic BS about how much you don’t like the movie. Not liking something should be enough.I thought it could be a useful springboard to discussion about this film from 2019 and where it went wrong the way it did.It just makes you look like a dumbass who posts hyperbolic nonsense about A Children’s Space Movie being “The Worst Movie Evar!!1!” and that you can’t engage with the movie in question with any nuance. Hell, a good chunk of the comments replying to your OP are mocking the video you posted rather than talking about the movie. Posting hyperbolic videos with shitty thumbnails if anything shuts down discussion about the movie and just makes you look like you are incapable of nuance. Because all people are seeing is the hyperbolic thumbnail about a Star Wars movie and a wall of text and their eyes immediately glaze over. If you wanna talk about Star Wars, don’t post hyperbolic videos calling a Star Wars movie “A Cinematic Disaster”.
Well, that title has a lot to do with marketing mechanics, doesn’t it? It wasn’t the first The Last Jedi video by a long shot but it’s quite possibly the most watched review of the movie (if it isn’t, it’s close).Now as a side note, I’ve seen figures that vary about how much they get paid per thousand views once the channel is monetised up to $5 per thousand depending who it is and what it’s about but even at $0.50/1000, that’s still several thousand dollars of income just for this one video.It’s what people do to stand out on the Internet, I’m guessing. On that point, there may well be a point to be made that these Star Wars movies increasingly started to fail at their primary goal because box office revenue did make big drops in grosses and the associated videos to this one and this channel who look at merchandising said those also marched off a cliff. It is actually worth asking why. I’ve heard it argued that TLJ good or bad wasn’t as repeat viewing/merchandising friendly a type of film.Look, TLJ attracted an explosion of videos for (Patrick Willem being just one) and against (others) in a way that TFA never did and subsequently RoS because of its over-course correction as well. The vocal for/against TLJ is the tip of a very large more unseen iceberg which for whatever reason, a lot of people are lukewarm to dislike to even hate this film. There’s no denying there’s a wide range of opinions on it and I do think it bled over into its financial performance.Tying that all in to The Lion King, yes it was soulless but it succeeded in making closer to what was expected of it in the same way Star Wars increasingly did not and presumably shifted more copies of the original and merchandise related to that.Anyway, I found it interesting to ask about it and see what other people thought and got a variety of feedback and things to think about. I’m especially interested it what went wrong with trying to put together just a single trilogy. I agree that once Rian Johnson set up a number of things in his film, they should have used them. Definitely would have made for a better RoS.
Wow that’s not even remotely what I was talking about. I’m talking specifically when you posted that video, it didn’t matter why he chose that thumbnail. All that mattered is that they have seen dozens upon dozens of assholes like The Quartering post hyperbolic nonsense about Star Wars that they won’t read your wall of text or even watch the video since it makes you look like some asshole looking for a reason to hate them because “SJW’s”. You basically dropped a turd in the punch bowl and it doesn’t matter how many times you insist the turd’s a snickers, it still looks like a turd .Next time if you wanna have a nuanced discussion on Star Wars, don’t post videos with hyperbolic thumbnails because you “find them interesting”. Have your own goddamn opinions.
TL:DR – I’ll argue the earlier article opened the door to talking about this sort of commentary if not was an invitation and we’ve got to do a bit better than just dismiss people right off the bat if we want to be better at it than they are.The original spiking of the punchbowl was opening the previous article titled: “The Last Jedi let the past die—and pissed off a galaxy of overprotective fans in the process”https://www.avclub.com/the-last-jedi-let-the-past-die-and-pissed-off-a-galaxy-1847403412If anything, that would actually open the door to talking about these diehard fans even just a bit.I thought there were some potentially valid points, like what looked a major dramatic payoff with Finn’s sacrifice in TLJ and how it devolved into a muddled mess in the end. The argument that it could have been better to let Finn die there wasn’t one I’d thought of but got me thinking.Now it doesn’t look good to accuse the ‘other side’ of misinterpreting things to flat out getting them wrong when people aren’t even identifying the preview image correctly (this is a whole different video with and different image and everything), never mind not even looking at a few quotes taken out of it in defence of The Last Jedi conveniently put there to read so you don’t have to watch a 1 hour + video. I mean, if we can’t make that much effort. I think they’re good points, does anyone seriously dispute TLJ had some good ideas to start the next movie with and that RoS did it and the whole series a great disservice by walking them back so blatantly.It helps even less when you have articles like Rewriting Ripley doing such a terrible job with their research in lumping in every single critic of TLJ as being part of the right to alt-right either. The TLJ video was referenced as it’s one of the most watched if not the most watched TLJ video for whatever reason and saying the maker has right-wing sympathies/alignments is wrong given he’s a leftist who voted for Biden and the fact he follows right wing personalities on Twitter is to repeatedly attack what they’re saying. I mean, some basic research would have caught all this depending on what the intention of the article was.Sure, I do have to have a word to him about how there’s more to being on the Left than just voting and he’s possibly not fully aware of the danger of people like Mitch McConnell and some of his jokes really shouldn’t be made because they’re … just not the sort of things I think you should say – but there are times we need to be doing better with our rebuttals than “Oh he’s got a beard and he’s fat.” – He knows he’s fat, he references that in his videos at times.It was quite the sight watching the left, centre and right on Youtube uniting against this article, though: “Though I can’t stand … I will defend him in this instance.” (I saw a lot out that out there including effectively “Ugh … Vito but still …” by Geeks and Gamers and RK Outpost while Vito did call Ryan Kinel “A clown amongst clowns” but they still all stood up for each other, so a real hands across America moment).I haven’t even gotten into MauLer (and he stays out of the real world politics sphere as much as possible) and his three part critique of The Last Jedi (that’s at least 5 hours) and if you add in EFAP, there’s easily more than a day of continuous listening on Star Wars (and probably on TLJ alone, it would surprise me).But there’s points in there from everyone to Patrick Willems (who loved The Last Jedi and was livid at JJ Abrams about RoS) to Vito to everyone else and I’ve learned a lot from all of this.I actually realised recently that I’ve only ever seen each Star Wars film once (except ironically Solo which I have not seen at all) and the 1st and the 3rd of the OT on TV but the reason as to why this film series I guess it is because Star Wars is a cultural icon and it really deserved much better care in the planning and execution and looking at it so closely is a study in what went so wrong.I’ll leave it this post with a quote from the Youtuber Jay Exci about the Disney Trilogy which I thought summed things up perfectly “Each of these films worked better without the other two.”It didn’t have to be this way and hopefully someone who has the power over making these films will take the lessons from this whole experience and avoid it next time. For those of us who don’t, I found it not only an interesting and behind the scenes education how the sausage gets made so to speak but how we didn’t get as good sausage as the first batch, even factoring in our ages then and now and nostalgia.
For the last fucking time: Stop posting shitty YouTube videos from assholes who make five hour long rants about A Space Wizard Movie. I am not asking you to write a wall of text to discuss why they don’t like the movie or why you don’t like it. I’m telling you that those kinds of YouTubers have a bit of a negative reputation and posting them here stymies nuanced conversations that you seem to want to have but are incapable of doing because you have no actual opinions of your own but ones you copied from assholes that won’t just let a fucking Space Wizard Movie from 4 years ago go and move on with their lives.I don’t care what these people have to say, I have my own opinions of the Space Wizard Movies. I don’t need to watch 12, 10-part, 9 hour, YouTube videos from an asshole who stabs Rose Tico dolls with a pair of scissors. Have your own fucking opinions and stop regurgitating other people’s opinions.Stop dropping snickers in punch bowls and being surprised when people think they’re turds. Just don’t like the movie. I don’t even care at this point why you don’t like it. I’m just telling you that videos that Thumbnails like Vito’s in your OP regarding Space Wizard Movies turn off people’s interest in whatever you have to say. Just stop posting them if you wanna talk about Space Wizard Movies. That’s all I’m asking. I don’t need a wall of text from you talking about these YouTubers.
Ever see the Plinkett reviews? I like that the (fictional) old man who killed several wives and holds kidnapped hookers in his basement had a much more nuanced take on the new Star Wars than the edgelord imitators, and had reasons to dislike Ghostbusters 2016 that weren’t “dames aren’t funny!”
I’m not in position right now to watch the video, but hopefully it mentions Luke finding meaning in the Force beyond the teachings and traditions of the Jedi. The Jedi used the force to their purposes, but they WEREN’T the Force. That and Kylo’s suggestion that there was a third way for the universe opened so many possibilities. Luke’s parallels to Obi Wan and Yoda with respect to his self-exile were interesting as well.
What if, instead of Rey’s father being Palpatine’s son, her mother was Palpatine’s daughter, and the reason Rey was a nobody was because she couldn’t carry on his name? And it was his own blind interest in patriarchal lines that caused him to disregard his daughter and was his own ultimate undoing? Though then her dad wouldn’t be a failed clone or whatever happened in that movie – to be honest I stopped paying attention midway through the opening crawl and just let the dull sensation of visuals and noise wash over me until I could escape the theater.
My analogy for RoS was that Disney treated the hardcore TLJ haters like a dad treats a kid when he catches them smoking, make them smoke the whole pack.They went out of their way to give those loudest voices everything they said they wanted in the most malicious way possible.“Here, look, we sidelined the dumb girl, we made Rey special again, made Kyle a badass and we gave Chewie his medal, ArE YoU hApPy NoW?”
It essentially was that, and they added they aren’t adding anymore to this saga (I’m sure they’ll go back on it in 10 years) at least in theatrical releases. People still called Rey a Mary Sue even though they tried to make up for it by showing that she does get trained (as did Leia so shutup about her Poppins monent!) So I hope they learned not to listen to fan chatter
I think they have, RoS was basically telling those assholes to fuck off and treat them like the babies they were.I kinda respect it, to be honest.
rise of skywalker is godawful, but just looking at this shitty thumbnail makes me want to defend it for some reason. say what you will about j.j. abrams, his two-hour wankfests are at least easy on the eyes
I agree with many of the points, though he got very neckbeard on TLJ it has issues to be sure. Rian had some good ideas going. Red Letter Media referred to it as “like a high schooler made it, but a really smart and talented high schooler” and also “a marathon runner that shits himself at the end of the race”. I don’t think it betrayed Luke’s character at all, or if anyone did it was JJ as Force Awakens explicitly says Luke ran off into exile. So Luke had to have this attitude in the film, and in the end he does change his mind and save the day. For me it was definitely the weird humor, stagnation of the new characters, the lack of execution and going back on many of the points of the film. They really don’t start a new type of Jedi, Rey took the books anyway, Kylo doesn’t break the cycle/cliche of Vader, Luke’s actions don’t lead to an uprising (that’s more ROS’s fault but they could’ve set up a better cliffhanger like Lando or Wedge answering the call to pick the Falcon up)
It’s a movie that only works if you’ve memorized the original because otherwise I cant imagine you would get a single thing out of watching this. Lions don’t have facial expressions, so you wind up with this:[Lion #1 stares blankly at lion #2]Audience: oh, I remember this part from the original. They’re falling in love![Lions continue to stare blankly, start to fall asleep]
Nowhere is this more clear than its version of Be Prepared, which honestly feels like it was designed as a reprise of a song we never hear the full version of.
I haven’t seen this remake yet, but I did see the clip of “Can’t Wait to be King.” And man, why to take a visually creative sequence and just turn it into…animals running around.
I haven’t seen the movie but that still of Baby Simba at the top of this article is so damning, you wonder why they didn’t stop the project the second somebody saw that render. In the original film, Baby Simba’s expression as Rafiki holds him high actually evokes that of a newborn child, his facial features squirming and eyes adjusting to grasp the enormity of what they behold.
“Live Action” Baby Simba, even in motion, simply looks bored, just completely bored out of his tiny effing skull. They didn’t even attempt to compensate by giving him body language to indicate discomfort, it’s just a monkey holding up a completely inert cat who is practically shooting a “Can you believe this, folks?” deadpan look straight to camera.
I work at a cinema and so have access to film posters and a son who loves them. The teaser poster of baby Simba is the only poster he’s refused to have on his wall.
If they really wanted to go for realistic action Simba should’ve shown his love for her the way real lions do. Bite the back of her neck and-
Honestly, the lions don’t even look realistic because they don’t have lion expressions- which are more in the “I want to kill that. Can I kill that? Hmm I’m hungry” vein and don’t really work for anthropomorphized characters.
I can’t star your comment on Kotaku…damn Kinja and greys, but I see you!
I mean, I get Disney’s reasoning. I remember when they tried to do original, left-field experiments back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s like Tron, The Black Hole, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Black Cauldron, The Watcher in the Woods when they were going through a crisis and a reorganization of the top brass within the company. While some are regarded as cult classics now, they all bombed at the box office more or less.
Honestly, I don’t even look forward to much of Disney’s theatrical output anymore, whether they be more so-called ‘live action’ remakes or the next phase in the MCU but their content line-up on Disney+ is where it’s at with shows like The Mandalorian, Loki, The Bad Batch, the recent Marvel’s ‘What If?’ and the announced spin-offs, I’ll have plenty of exciting content to keep me entertained for the foreseeable future.
Heard good things about Cruella?
Cruella rules. And I say that as someone who was HUGELY skeptical going in. But I loved it. It was too long & didn’t pull the trigger on making Cruella truly evil like it should have. But every major sequence in the movie that needed to kick ass kicked ass. And my 8 year-old daughter now has 100% more Stooges, Blondie & Doors on her playlist.
I almost stopped watching it when Cruella’s mom died. That moment made me laugh out loud and get mad at the movie. I get that no one probably wants to see a movie about a woman skinning animals, but part of the fun of the character in the original was how over the top evil she was. The attempts they made to humanize her and possibly give some reason for how she turned out, just fell flat for me.
That said, the acting was good and it was a nice looking movie. Once I settled in, I thought it was fine. But I probably wouldn’t have continued if not for my daughter watching it with me.
I cannot get over that something this cool happened in a Disney movie. This blew my kid’s head off.
Funny thing is, I walked away from it thinking that it really wasn’t a prequel, it was more of a story about the inspiration for 101 Dalmatians. When the movie ended, Roger was writing the Cruella de Vil song. I took that as he eventually wrote 101 Dalmatians based on his experience, but not that it was based in reality.
Cruella at least wasn’t just a straight-up remake.
Yeah, it is more comparable to Maleficent (which actually is pretty good) — a sympathetic origin story for a villainess. Obviously both are more than a little inspired by Wicked.
We watched it last night and I completely agree. The story isn’t great, which would usually be a deal breaker for me, but it’s got Gotham levels of crazy energy, the production design is stunning, both Emma’s look like they are having a great time and chew scenery like they haven’t eaten in a month, and the sound track is relentless and irrepressible. We enjoyed it a lot more than we expected to.
Great soundtrack!!
As a child of the 80s , most of the animated Disney stuff of that era ( bar maybe the Black Cauldron) was just …meh , so I’ve never really had the love most other younger or older people seem to have for them.Also the odds of a live action Basil the great mouse detective, or Rescuers down under are zero thank god.
And of all their misfired, The Black Cauldron was the most disappointing all of my friends read The Chronicles of Prydain series and were stoked they were going to make a movie from them. Then…thud.
I’d love to see an update for a Rescuers movie. And Bob Newhart can come back to do the voice! He’ll be 92 years young tomorrow!
“Also the odds of a live action Basil the great mouse detective, or Rescuers down under are zero thank god.”
3D-animated remakes aren’t out of the question, though.
All the movies you mentioned are interesting. Maybe not hits or even good films, but they can’t be faulted for creativity. The recent live action films absolutely can be damned for lacking anything creative or soulful.
That’s kind of the weirdest part – no one would object if they remade the shitty movies and had fantastic odds of making them better, but remaking the great movies runs a near 100% chance of just making them worse!
Remake Atlantis the Lost Empire. I like the film but it has a lot of flaws.
Oh I agree. I live for those movies and as you said, they’re not great but certainly memorable for their boldness.
Cooking with Cranston mentioned that, Tyler “Bio” Rodriguez — but he also mentioned the most important aspect to Disney: They lost money. Tron seems innovative and smart now, but to audiences in 1982 it was just…baffling because Where Were the Spaceships? Or the Rayguns? Or the Cute, Adorable, Marketable Aliens? Most importantly, where were the “relatable” figures?George Lucas scaled a different parapet (Science Fiction as his generation’s Western) than his friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola did (Coppola’s was the greater achievement, finishing the blend of arthouse and grindhouse his mentor Roger Corman started!), but it took time for enough people to join him up there and start to change audience tastes — often by, initially at least, financially flopping.
Tron was a costly flop. It also played a small role in getting Lasseter fired in the 1980s. In the 80s they were trying just about anything to see if it worked. Some of it did but a lot didn’t.
Actually, Tom’s suggestion of a filmed version of Taymor’s staging of Lion King could be pretty good. The filmed version of Hamilton was one of the best film representations of a stage play that I’ve ever seen.
Yeah it would be cool if they approached it like some crazy sci-fi/samurai society that wore armored suits that approximated animals and based their hierarchy on predator-prey relationships.
Surely they have to do a movie of Taymor’s masterpiece, “Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark”! Especially in the more insane “1.0″ version that featured the mythological character of Arachne as the villain and included a “Geek chorus” (pun intended) to comment on the action.
Don’t forget the always onstage rockband instead of an orchestra. No idea if that stayed in later versions, I only saw the show in previews one of the times it nearly killed one of the performers.
Don’t forget Condorman!
I’m guessing you’re just the target audience for the Disney+ shows considering what you listed.Those aren’t any different from what’s in theaters – socially conservative, creatively safe expansions and rehashes of their other existing tentpole franchises.
One thing the article leaves out is that Lion King was rereleased in 3D and made a frankly shocking $94 million dollars domestically and another $91 million overseas.So when they saw that number and then saw numbers for things like Tomorrowland and Prince of Persia, it would have been almost irresponsible for them not to go down this road.
Also they got hit hard by John Carter, which I actually enjoyed
It felt like Disney was really firing on all cylinders for a while. Even forgettable efforts like “Bolt” were fun and we got legitimately good movies like Tangled and Wreck It Ralph. Now they seem to have abandoned any real ambition or risk-taking.
Yeah, Raya was a pretty big step down in quality, which sucks given that they actually went out of their way to cast regionally appropriate actors for a change. Meanwhile Pixar has downgraded to a secondary studio that seems more interested in making small-scale experiments like Onward, Soul and Luca, all of which I either really liked or loved, but are a long way away from WALL*E or The Incredibles in terms of ambition.
Yeah, I get why they want to stay safe with many of their big tentpole companies. It just sucks because some of those cult films were really good or at least took a big risk. Another example is the early 00’s with movies like Atlantis and Treasure Planet. And also Fox’s Titan AE. If they had come out 5-10 years later they would’ve been massive hits.
Titan AE suffered through production hell as the final product shows and ultimately sank Fox Animation Studios. Well, that and Toy Story. The innovation of CGI animation was a major game-changer that would forever alter the course of feature animation, much to Don Bluth’s disappointment…and mine.
It also seems like the more of the old guard of Disney died the more traditional animation died with them, I think it was more the CG boom but they had a tight knit group (called the Nine Old Men) who animated or at least advised with most of the traditional movies.
The worst part of this movie—and that is a goddamn CONTEST—is that in a movie so slavishly devoted to the original and its soundtrack, they excised the best part about both.Replacing Be Prepared with a one-minute-at-most spoken word interlude reasonably can’t be considered a crime under any jurisdiction, but whoever did it should be punished like it is.
Like if the upcoming Little Mermaid remake excised Poor Unfortunate Souls.
Do we really want to hear Melissa McCarthy try to sing that though?
While I agree that she probably can’t match the original because no one could, she’ll do just fine:
I could see her have a lot of fun with it. It won’t be as good, but that’s just because it’s a hard act to follow, I could easily imagine Melissa McCarthy having a version of Poor Unfortunate Souls that at least has its own energy.
If I recall the Gaston song in the remake omitted the line “and every last inch of me is covered in hair.” BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Poor Luke Evans and his lack of body hair.
They’re totally going to do something about it, like add a line about body positivity to the part about the merfolk who were too fat/thin. Also Triton is going to be a much nicer dad, and they’ll likely add backstory to him and Ursula, and Ariel’s mom. And it’ll be awful.
100 percent second on the dropping of Be Prepared as actual crime.
And you know for a fact that when they remake Hunchback, Hellfire will get the axe.
Hunchback is one where they would really really be wise to follow the stage version, complete with its downer ending (at one point Eisner wanted to adapt it–this was when it was a hit on stage in Berlin but Disney was scared to bring it to the US–for a TV movie musical…)
“Heckfire”
I completely agree. Even calling this version of Be Prepared a song is a stretch. The original might be the best Disney villain song of all-time (with the visuals to boot) and they just butchered it. Why?!?!
They realized that a CGI lion singing “Be Prepared” in 2019 could never compete with the time I saw a camgirl singing “Be Prepared,” also in 2019. She did the hyena voices and everything.
The original Lion King came out when I was a teenager and I saw it in theaters at the time. Having grown up on Disney movies I didn’t think much of it at the time.
When the remake came out I went back and watched the original — I was totally blown away. It’s not a perfect film, but the animation is some of Disney’s best and there’s several memorable songs.But the one thing nobody talks about is the digital compositing. In the opening sequence alone there are fades between multiple layers of animation and visual effects layers. So the idea of a CGI remake is a little silly to begin with when you realize the original film was already partially CGI when it came out.
Thats a good point. I remember how proud Disney was to talk about the extent of computer effects in the “making of” extras that came with the orginal vhs version.
The so-called Golden Age of Disney animation (1989-94) weirdly means very little to me, because I was age 8-13 when those movies came out, too old to like Disney movies as a kid & not old enough to like them as a teen/adult (I would find out in a couple years that girls love to go see Disney movies on dates, which would eventually bring me around to getting over myself & admitting that I love this shit). Therefore the remakes of Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast & The Lion King don’t enrage me the way they do a lot of other people. They aren’t good, certainly, I just can’t work up the energy to care as much as I will when they eventually remake The Rescuers or Toy Story.
I was unaware teens had a non-nostalgic interest in Disney cartoons.
I do remember seeing a few like Finding Nemo as a teenager and loving them, that one was popular with teenagers, and to some extent Incredibles and Lilo and Stitch. Otherwise it was the more adult fare like POTC
That’s the renaissance age, the golden age was 1937-42 (if we’re talking about films, if we were to include Silly Symphonies and Goofy cartoons and whatnot we could extend that a little further each side). I guess in many ways the renaissance films have superseded the Golden Age films in the cultural consciousness, and as a child of the era and just as a fan of animation there a couple of them I love as much as anyone, but I think it would be hard to argue they broke new artistic ground on the level of Snow White and Fantasia and such.
Yeah those great five original animated features–when Walt was truly invested and risking the studios finances with each film (remember only Snow White and the “done on the cheap” Dumbo turned a profit partly due to the war-closed foreign market)–are truly stunning. What always impresses me about them, and what I think still doesn’t get acknowledged enough by classic film snobs, is that all of them to varying degrees–Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi and Dumbo–hold up *at least as well* as the best live action films from Hollywood at the time. They still play well to modern audiences, but also the actual filmmaking craft, stuff like “camera work” often feels more modern than a lot of the live films from that time.
Yeah, while I loved Little Mermaid and really enjoyed the others at the time, only Beauty and the Beast still holds up for me as an adult and can compare to the Golden Age material. (I think the pretty-pretty princess merchandising these days conceals how intense and moving it is at its best.)
Not digging Disney as an 8-year-old? I guess you did have Kindergarten Cop to usher you into the world of PG-13 swears and violence. I’m a year or two younger than you and had more restrictions on what I could watch, but up to Lion King I saw all these in theaters and liked/loved them. It is funny though, a year later I wouldn’t have been caught dead watching Hunchback — the falloff from Disney when you get too old (adolescence) is steep. The Rescuers remake will sub in Josh Gad for Bob Newhart, won’t it? God damn you for making me think of such a blasphemy.
Yeah, I dunno what to tell you, 3rd grade was when I traded in New Kids on the Block and Disney for Motley Crue and Ninja Turtles, because I was a tOtAl BaD aSs.Hunchback was right around the time I started coming back to Disney, because of the aforementioned dates.
Shouting at the devil is empirically more badass than merely hanging tough.
I was a Warner Bros partisan. Bugs Bunny > Mickey Mouse.
Oh, of course. Not even a debate.
The SNL TV Funhouse “Journey to the Disney Vault” cartoon is one of my favorites, if just for the joke where Mickey Mouse begs the kids who have discovered the terrible things Disney wants buried to simply ignore the bad stuff and just remember the good times: “Think of all the laughs I’ve given you!” A beat, then one of the nonplussed children tentatively asks “…you’re supposed to be funny?”
I enjoyed Disney fine but WB was where the cool kids went. Same applies to Nickelodeon vs Disney. The cool quirky kids flocked to Nick, the church kids to Disney.
The cool quirky kids flocked to Nick, the church kids to Disney.I watched both. Does that mean I was a cool quirky church kid? I would be totally OK with that assessment.
As an GenXer, I actually never saw (other than the bit in Fantasia) a Mickey Mouse cartoon as a child in the 1970s. Mickey was just the symbol of Disney. I think Millennials may have more connection with the character because they grew up with the Disney Channel which showed those old Mickey shorts, plus I think they started making new Mickey cartoons as well. On the other hand, every Saturday morning there were a couple of hours of Warner Brothers cartoons broadcast on over-the-air network television, so I did grow up with Bugs Bunny and friends.
I mean I was 9-years-old when The Little Mermaid came out—I was watching Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Lethal Weapon 2 that year.
The Jungle Book theatrical re-release got me laid in college by a girl I’d gone to high school with who was entirely out of my league. So yeah…your statement is empirically true.
Hell yeah, man!
No, bfred, YOU got you laid! The Jungle Book remake just gave you the confidence to go for it!Or, Idris Elba’s voiceover work is pure panty-peeler.
Dubious, but thanks. I definitely made this face:
Did these girls not babysit or interact with actual children in any significant way? I always hated “family movie outings” with my younger sister (7 year gap) because it just meant I’d be that sicker of seeing/hearing it when I inevitably encountered it at babysitting. (Little kids love the same movies, and they like watching their favorites over and over again.)Little kid repeat viewing even killed my affection for Finding Nemo, which was like, the first/only Disney movie I actively enjoyed seeing after aging out.
Heh, I guess not.
I was prime kid age during the Disney Renaissance, and overall those movies had very little impact on me. One of my earliest clear memories (kinda fuzzy on the details) is my mom renting The Little Mermaid on what must have been the first weekend that it hit home video, simply because the word-of-mouth had been so effusive she had to know what the big deal was; 90 minutes later it had completely failed to land for the grown woman or the 5-year-old. Aladdin I saw on a school trip – one of those “It’s December, end-of-semester testing is done and we don’t want to deal with these gosh-darn kids for another day” excursions you could get away with in a pre-No Child Left Behind era – and that one worked for me, but entirely because of Robin Williams. The Lion King I saw in theaters, because it was pretty much legally mandated that you had to do that in 1994. I remember I enjoyed it overall, though it peaked with “Be Prepared.” (I know I saw Beauty and the Beast on VHS at some point in there, but it made so little of an impression that I couldn’t tell you a damn thing about it.)
Fast forward a few years and I was being dragged to Hercules by my grandmother, who was taking the two rich kids she nannied for. I was a snippy 12-year-old at the time and thought I was completely done with this kiddie crap, I sat there as the lights went down arms folded and sneer in place, steeling myself for an hour and a half of sappy songs and stupid jokes…then found myself having the time of my dang life. Surprisingly solid action, good music, funny visual gags, and Danny DeVito and James Woods (before he was a problem) turning in great performances.
Yeah, I actually never saw The Lion King or Aladdin until my kid wanted to watch them the last few years. And my kid watched the live action Lion King first and then saw the animated one and said he liked the live action one better–blashemy for some, but as long as he’s enjoying them, I don’t really care.
I’m about your age, and yet I would absolutely disagree with you on Lion King especially. The live action stuff? There’s always been a desire for that to see if it can be done that way after first being animated. That I can acknowledge even if it’s not something I understand the need for. In Japan they do live action of anime and apparently they’re usually bad too. Lion King though is remaking an animated film, as a differently animated film which ruthlessly excises all that was good about the original. There’s nothing added to replace it, and the whole thing reeks of only existing as a naked cash grab.
Also what they did to Be Prepared (aka the best ever Disney song, don’t @ me) was just criminal.
I’m a bit younger than you, and it’s true girls love that shit. If I hadn’t talked my future wife out of “Home on the Range” for our ~3rd date my life would likely be very different. (We saw Eternal Sunshine instead.)
I perhaps shouldn’t admit this to you, but I was exactly your age during those years too, and I found it thrilling. But I was already an animation nut (I think the first non-fiction books I read when I was 7 or whatever were stuff like The Art of Disney) and I remember being 8 and obnoxiously proclaiming how bad Disney films had become–and then becoming obsessed with The Little Mermaid (granted some of that obsession tied into my love of musical theatre and, in hindsight though I wasn’t really a particularly obviously gay kid, despite these stereotypical gay interests, maybe that played a part too…) Seriously, I think I naively thought that Disney was showing that you could really start to make anything in animation and then… that all fell apart (and I got a bit older and had firmly discovered anime by that point). Still, I was pretty actively invested in the annual Disney films, though with more criticisms, until up through Hercules.
No shame in that game man, you were being smarter & more self-aware than I was at the time.
I was the right age for them – Little Mermaid was among the very first films I saw (first in cinemas was TMNT). It, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and Lion King all hit just right and were solid repeated rewatches all through my childhood.I saw Hunchback in cinemas and, while I found it absolutely beautiful, I never had the desire to rewatch it.Never got to see Hercules in cinemas despite the absolute wall-to-wall advertising and features on it in the kids magazines around that time. Saw Mulan in cinemas (twice!) and absolutely loved it. Missed Tarzan (I believe I chose to see Wild Wild West instead).After having to take my sister to see Emporer’s New Groove in 2000, I don’t believe I saw another of their (non-Pixar) animated films in cinemas (or at all) after that.
As a kid, I never really cared for the Jungle Book or Beauty and the Beast, or frankly, Aladdin either, so I wasnt as attached to them and really enjoyed the live action remakes for what they were. As for the Lion King however, the only thing I enjoyed with Simon and Pumba. Everything else had the fun sucked out of them
“The original had way too many white people in the cast…”Does anyone genuinely think this? I mean, it’s actors voicing cartoon animals. Maybe 5 or 10 people out of the thousands who work on a movie. Actors who probably worked fewer hours than anyone else in the credits. I’d scour the makeup of the creative and production teams before I’d take offense at unseen actors reading lines in a recording booth.
I’d say that argument makes more sense with Aladdin, as it depicts an actual culture and the villains were a bit stereotypical looking and with funny accents. With talking lions it really shouldn’t make a difference. Though I think Matthew Broderick wasn’t the best choice as adult Simba.
On the subject of Bad Boys For Life, I would love to see an interview with the actor who played Reggie. He only has two credits, these two films about 17 years apart.To start with, how did he get the role, what led up to it and then as it seems his primary career isn’t acting, what was it like to get the call for this all these years later, what he’s been doing in the meantime and what he thought about doing the role so far apart and returning to it and so on.
Leave it to Disney to make the term “live action” into meaning “different form of animation”I only got through this movie trying to guess from memory what shots and dialogue were exactly like the original.
I very much suspect it was purely so they could call Frozen 2 their highest grossing animated film, despite it falling short of The Lion King’s numbers.
The problem with that hypothesis is Frozen II came out after The Lion King remake, and Disney was insisting on calling the TLK remake “live action” even while it was still in production. It was always just a marketing tactic, to get people to see something that was familiar and comforting while still “new”.
Well, it’s my two-year-old’s favorite movie, and it was incredibly useful during the pandemic when I was working from home and needed something to occupy him.
Why haven’t you shown your two-year old the original Lion King? That might actually blow his mind if his favourite film is this piece of crap.
I’m honestly jealous of someone who loves this film and is genuinely unaware of the original. Discovering the original film would be an entire awakening of an experience. Wow.
Beauty and the Beast already had a superior live action version.
This does not meet the federally mandated minimum of Perlman.
The live action remake actually made a few nods to this film which it absolutely did not earn.
I made that joke earlier, but you beat me to it this thread.
Ugly-ass busted lookin’ hoopdee lion
I am pretty shocked at the death of small cinema. The theatres are struggling, the studios are struggling. I look at the theatre in my town week after week if there is something interesting and see a big bowl of nothing. Why not give the little guys a chance to do something creative? Take 10 up and coming artists, give them budgets of, say 5 million, and see what happens. I guarantee there will be at least one huge win.
Also, for the love of god, bring back R-rated cinema. Nothing but cheap horror flicks are nowadays rated R. No bite, no subversion, no satire, no sensuality, no passion… it’s nowadays all mindless PG-13 CGI porn. Entire demographics of moviegoers have been completely abandoned. As Anthony Mackie explains in his famous interview, Hollywood is nowadays only making movies for 16 year olds and China.
Would showing old classics and cult films on the big screen save theaters? Would the streaming services and studios even allow it? imagine getting to see star wars or raiders of the lost ark on the big screen again complete with popcorn? or did big home theaters kill that option also?
They already do this. Art house theaters have been showing classics and cult films for decades. And with Fathom events, even the big chain theaters will show them. I saw The Princess Bride on the big screen a few years ago for one such event.
The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto was pulling in decent audiences to classic films pre-pandemic.
Disney did withdraw most Fox titles from Repertory cinema circulation when they got their library, including some that had been very popular like Alien and Aliens, they were even planning to withdraw Rocky Horror Picture Show from the midnight circuit until they realised that would be a PR disaster. To be fair there were screenings of Empire Strikes Back (and probably others) last year when theatres started opening up again, presumably to keep theatres on their good side for forthcoming MCU films etc. Guessing Amazon aren’t chomping at the bit to share the post-86 MGM catalogue, but we’ll see.
Hollywood is nowadays only making movies for 16 year olds and China. That’s because they figured out it’s the most profitable approach, and the movie studios are all owned by giant conglomerates that don’t see their movie studio subsidiaries as anything more than profit engines. I don’t know of a solution to this problem aside from, like, legislation making it illegal for movie studios to be owned by other corporations.
At some point, when we’ll be too far out of the pandemic for that to be given as a credible factor, the current model of making films that need to make around a billion dollars to be considered a success will collapse; it’s clearly not sustainable. What happens after that, I don’t know.
it’s clearly not sustainableWhat makes you say that? It seems to have been working fine for over a decade.
I mean I don’t know it for a fact, but I just don’t see a world where studios spend need to get around a billion on each of their 5 or more biggest movies each year lasting forever. I’m also not sure to what extent it’s been working for the industry as a whole so much as it’s been working for Disney.
It’s working okay for Universal, at least as far as the F&F franchise goes. Disney obviously is the 8,000-ton gorilla in the room, which has numerous franchises/teams that keep printing money (Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar).Nothing lasts forever, and as always the “giant tentpole” model could change in relatively short order, but as yet I haven’t really seen anything to indicate that it is changing.
We can definitely make another Blazing Saddles. What we can’t make is another Caligula. Hollywood doesn’t have the nerve
Entire demographics of moviegoers have been completely abandoned. No, it’s more like those demographics of moviegoers abandoned the movies. Studios keep making films in successful genres until the genres cease to be successful. The decline of mid-budget cinema, adult drama, big-budget comedy, etc. all reflect increasing audience disinterest as they prefer to get those kinds of things from streaming TV, rather than on the big screen.
‘’Studios keep making films in successful genres until the genres cease to be successful.’’
Yes, but in the process the studio forgot to CREATE new genres, and you do that by putting forth new, exciting and ORIGINAL movies which transcent existing genres or drastically redefine them. These studios are using sequels and remakes as a crutch, and they can’t keep running things into the ground forever.
When the underlying audiences for whole swathes of movies have disappeared, there’s minimal foundation to do stuff like that.
You’re literally describing the Blumhouse model there, give or take the widespread theatrical release. Its proven to work, so I can’t for the life of me understand why it doesn’t catch on more.
Make one fewer 150-200M movie a year, make 20-30 smaller movies with the same money, give it to a mix of up and coming filmmakers and established directors who want to do a passion project, and one of them is almost bound to make that money back. Anything the rest make is pure profit.
What’s truly incredible about these recent remakes is that for the most part, how much money they make is inversely proportional to their quality. Pete’s Dragon is clearly the best of them, but it made a drop in the bucket of what The Lion King, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast all made, and those films are terrible. I actually think Burton’s Dumbo is a solid remake that does something a little different with the premise, and it barely made lift off at the box office. The outlier, of course, is The Jungle Book, which was a solid movie and made bank. This might all come down to name recognition. People have more emotional connection to The Lion King than Dumbo or Pete’s Dragon. But the more depressing answer is that Disney knows what the public wants: warmed over gruel. They make boring live action remakes because the public wants boring live action remakes.
I have no idea why David Lowery felt like doing Petes Dragon inbetween Ghost Story and Green Knight.
That may be, but as the one person (apparently) who adored Pete’s Dragon as a child, I see that remake as just as bad as all the others. Bryce Dallas Howard is no Helen Ready. No songs, no colorful characters, lifeless and dull, not even the same story because they omitted The Gogans. The original movie is in effect, a tale about saving a child from an abusive home. Elliot as his protector is a metaphor for Pete’s escape, that’s why the dragon is framed as some sort of imaginary friend nobody believes exists. The remake is basically a ‘Boy Finds a Dog’ trope, where the dog happens to be a dragon. (He’s even furry like a dog now to make him more cuddly!) It’s a film that has more in common with The Water Horse, than the movie its based.
But nobody cares about the original Pete’s Dragon, so nobody minds. This leaves me alone on an island shouting in the wind, lol
No I agree completely. David Lowery is a super talented filmmaker and Pete’s Dragon felt like such a waste of his abilities.
Candles In the Water is genuinely great. Miss you Helen.
I watched the original a few times as a kid, and I always hated the songs, but loved it when the dragon actually appeared. But the mother Hogan grossed me out. That fake mole was just too much.
I have not seen this remake and never will. I am fine with pretending that the 1994 Lion King is the only movie version that exists. Thank you for your time.
Please dear God watch this and share it far and wide so I never have to hear the “Lion King ripped off Kimba” argument again
Citation on that “Lion King ripped off Kimba” bit? Baffling how anyone could still be parroting that after YMS’s entertaining and thoroughly-researched takedown last year — one need only search “kimba” on YouTube and his 4M+ video remains the first result. Nice article otherwise.
“But if any of these remakes had any aesthetic or artistic value, it almost seemed like this happened by accident…”Dude, WHAT? Pete’s Dragon is probably the best kids’ movie of the last 10 years. Great story, three-dimensional characters, Redford giving a fuck, hugely rousing ending, stunning cinematography. That movie is 100% artistic value.
I took it to mean that Disney didn’t really care about artistic value. That a couple of the remakes (Pete’s Dragon is complimented just above your quote) had it is of no consequence to them.
Yeah, it seems like the lesser known Disney films do better in the remakes, I think partially because they’re more grounded in reality, dragon aside. So films like Atlantis and Black Cauldron could easily be remade into sprawling epics.
They took away my goose-stepping hyenas. That is an unforgivable sin. I of course saw this in theaters, as a child of the Disney Renaissance I had no choice; but I was thoroughly disappointed. Just…a pale imitation of the original, without any of the positives. Even the songs, which should’ve been, at worst, sing-a-longs, were weaker. Deeply disappointing.
All the goose-stepping hyenas we’re too busy planning for January 6th to appear in this film.
Fun fact: I saw a YouTube video of a lion cub trying to roar, and it sounded exactly like Simba trying to roar as a child. So I searched for an adult lion roar to compare it to how Mufasa roars, and it turns out real lion roars are pretty awful! Movie lion roars are actually tiger roars.
Thus forever proving that tigers are cooler than lions.
The thing that strikes me the most about the recent remakes is that the OG animated films were like THE tentpole film for the company each year. Then they just went and released three remakes within one year.
This says a lot about tentpole filmmaking in general over the past 30 years. It used to be a studio did a few mega-productions (summer blockbusters and/or Oscar bait) each year and then filled out the schedule with smaller productions. Now all the eggs are in a few baskets and nothing feels like an event because *everything* is supposed to feel like an event.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 2019 Post: The Numbers1. Avengers: Endgame, Disney, $858,373,000 2. The Lion King, Disney, $543,638,043 3. Frozen II, Disney, $450,439,533 4. Toy Story 4, Disney, $434,038,008 5. Captain Marvel, Disney, $426,829,839 6. Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, Disney, $390,706,234 7. Spider-Man: Far From Home, Sony/Columbia, $390,532,085 8. Aladdin, Disney, $355,559,216 9. Joker, Warner Bros., $333,772,511 10. Jumanji: The Next Level, Sony/Columbia, $235,933,751Wikipedia1. Avengers: Endgame, Disney, $2,797,800,5642. The Lion King, Disney, $1,656,943,3943. Frozen II, Disney, $1,450,026,9334. Spider-Man: Far From Home, Sony/Columbia, $1,131,927,9965. Captain Marvel, Disney, $1,128,274,7946. Joker, Warner Bros., $1,074,251,3117. Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, Disney, $1,074,140,6478. Toy Story 4, Disney, $1,073,394,5939. Aladdin, Disney, $1,050,693,95310. Jumanji: The Next Level, Sony/Columbia, $796,211,272
The technical achievements are undeniable — it looks absolutely photorealistic, they had Favreau wearing a VR helmet so he could look around a set that did not exist and place cameras that also did not exist exactly where he wanted them — but God, this movie sucks on toast.
The only bits I liked were when Zazu was talking, because then I could amuse myself by pretending I was watching a very strange episode of Last Week Tonight. “Tonight’s topic: The lion monarchy, or mane-archy…”
Our main story tonight concerns the Hyenes. Do they represent immigrants and if so how racist is that?
They so do. Simba gets all freaked out when Nala reveals he “let the hyenas in” otherwise he was a-OK with Scar as king.
Translated to European history? yes.
But then The Lion King codes the hyenas as both the immigrant threat and the brownshirts, which doesn’t make sense.A better comparison is to African ‘ethnic’ conflicts with the lions as the privileged caste carrying on a colonial managerial stewardship and the hyenas as the historical underclass. (E.g. something like the Rwandan Revolution, Lion:Tutsi::Hyena:Hutu, Scar sorta represents the Belgian administration throwing its support behind the Hutu to break up the Tutsi majority, Simba: the diaspora of Tutsi elites & eventual return to power of Kagame/RPF… not a 1:1 obviously but it maps a bit closer to the roles, I think)
There are clearly still a lot of weird political implications (so The Lion King is pro-racial paternalism??) in this metaphor’s ‘message’.
Yeah I think they wanted the hyenas to be just some sort of force that doesn’t respect nature, but that conflicts with the humanized characters and the fact that hyenas absolutely have an important place in the African ecosystem.
Has anyone tried synch the new voiceover cast to the original animation, just so there’s people of color voicing the characters, but with good animation that’s actually interesting to watch, rather than a detached, boring slog? I need to learn how to do these things myself….
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post: The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Saving Private Ryan (1998)The Dark Knight (2008)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)Jurassic Park (1993)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)The Avengers (2012)Toy Story 3 (2010)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King (2003)Spider-Man (2002)Toy Story (1995)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Titanic (1997)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Avengers: Infinity War (2018)Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part 2 (2011)Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)Independence Day (1996)The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Avatar (2009)Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)Spider-Man 3 (2007)Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)Forrest Gump (1994)American Sniper (2014)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)Shrek 2 (2004)The Lion King (2019)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
Shrek 2 is far too low
I was holding out hope for The Lion King to claim bottom spot.So close, so damn close!
I thought about it, but ultimately I figured that despite its soullessness, it still tells The Lion King story, which is a better story than Love Story. And, it looks better than The Jim Carrey Grinch.
That’s about where I’m at with The Lion King too, which is why I’m not as down on it as others. The story is still good enough that even when its bad, it’s not that bad. Just didn’t need to be made is all. There’s nothing worth talking about besides nitpicks- the same sorts of nitpicks I could call out in all sorts of other movies. But here, those nitpicks are elevated to criminal status, because the very existence of this film is, as it stands, offensive.
Wow Home Alone is so low? Like, I get if it’s not your bag but worse than American Sniper?!
Do you suppose anyone involved with the creation of this ever had a moment where they finally watched five minutes of it strung together, in a screening room, and had a brief panic attack over how completely misbegotten it all was? Just the blood-curdling confirmation that animals’ real faces convey about 1/100000000th of the emotion that cartoon animals can, and the whole project was the antithesis of art? Or was there no 1-second pause of reflection, just going straight to polishing the new superyacht this monstrosity would pay for?
The entire time I was reading this article, I kept thinking “wait, isn’t this series supposed to be in chronological order? Why is Tom going backwards in time to 2012 or whenever it was that this crapfest came out?”The idea that it was less than three years ago when this abomination happened just makes the brain seize up. Impossible. Unthinkable. Inconceivable.
I thought the same. I had to scroll back up to see the date. I’m like, which pandemic is he talking about? Ebola? That didn’t affect theater take…then I went back up and was like 2019? This happened then?I loved the original and watched the remake on a plane but turned it off. I figured I’d rather watch a repeat of something else than watch that. I little part of my heart died.
I know I’m about to get yelled at, but I think the Aladdin remake was pretty good.And I thought Will Smith was a solid Genie, he made Genie less of a distraction.I love Robin with my whole heart and I loved his Genie, but he did tend to suck the air out of the rest of the movie at times.
Ah but the massive problem with the remake is that lots of what made the genie fun were Robin’s ad libs, which sound soulless and limp in the remake. Some of the word for work dialogue just doesn’t work coming from Big Willie Smith.
I haven’t seen it but I’ve heard this from multiple people now — including the person I saw The Lion King remake with.
It’s certainly one of the better remakes. Which admittedly ain’t sayin’ much, but still.
Lion King is the absolute worst, including the ones I haven’t seen and the ones which are yet to be made.
This should be Disney’s Wilhelm scream. It needs to show up in random action scenes.
I would greatly be in favor of this. I know it plays during the Battle scene in Hunchback.
I would love nothing more than to hear a stormtrooper give this yell when falling into some standard-issue Imperial bottomless pit.
Good thing Galactic OSHA isn’t a thing.
One of my biggest cinematic surprises of 2019 was that Tim Burton’s(!) Dumbo was the best of the three live action remakes. Sure, “best” is by default but at least that had Keaton, DeVito and Arkin having fun.
Will was a decent Genie, I just thought the look of it all was very flat, and Jafar wasn’t nearly hammy enough. And they really should’ve just kept Iago as is, not made him a more realistic parrot. And they had to add a girlboss song. While I admire the attempt to give Jasmine more of a character, it just felt very forced and inauthentic, especially at that point in the movie.
I thought beefing up Jasmine’s screen time was just overkill on the point that was already made well in the first movie. She was always a “strong” character.
I actually liked the cast of the Aladdin remake, but it was so listlessly directed it might as well have been a student play.
The big issue I had with the Aladdin movie was that it was visually bland. Why hire Guy Ritchie if he isn’t going to use his kinetic style. Honestly the right fit for me would have been Baz Luhrmann.
I agree. I wasnt attached to Aladdin as a child, but one of my favorite actors growing up was Will Smith and I thought he did a great job as Genie. I definitely like that they tried to make him different from Robin William’s genie because there was no way he could of pulled that off and would have done him a disservice.
Even Homer Simpson couldn’t pull it off
I agree. I quite enjoy Aladdin. I think the Smith, Massoud, Scott, and Nasim make the movie work way more than it has any right to. Having actors who have personality is way better than watching expressionless CGI animals trying to do dramatics
It drives me batty that they call it live-action when it’s fully CGI. Also, I will never watch it, but everything I’ve seen about it, or songs I’ve heard; the “original vs new side by side” youtube videos of key moments…God, it just lucks fucking HORRIBLE
Only Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen, as Timon and Pumba, get a chance to riff, and they make the most of it. When they first appear, the film briefly threatens to come alive.The rest of the movie was honestly just a waste of time, but I was completely tuned in for their scenes. They were the ONLY parts I could even come close to claiming I enjoyed. For the rest, I was just like, “Why wouldn’t I just watch the original, which is both SHORTER and better?”
I know this is basically picking a needle out of a haystack to make an argument, but Lion King is not really ripping off Kimba the Lion outside of them both being animated Lion properties. The Kimba series is so long running they do occasionally overlap in subject matter, but it is also so overly simplistic and poorly made it’s hard to imagine anything could’ve been stolen from that series.
seems I was beaten to the punch many times over with this comment. My bad!
I wish they’d remake stuff that actually needed remaking, like the Watcher in the Woods or The Black Cauldron.
Yes to Black Cauldron (now that could be a good series…)
But careful what you wish for (while for Lifetime, I think Disney was still involved)
all hugely popular, none even remotely artistically necessary.I would argue that there’s a pretty important difference between popular and successful. Those movies were financially successful, but then they all completely vanished from pop culture discussion other than when people talk about why they were artistically bankrupt or whatever. No one is a fan of them. My kids have never, ever asked to watch them when it’s Disney rewatch o’clock. They want the originals.
I think what they amounted to was theme park maintenance. The Disney Corporation’s most lucrative business segment is theme parks, cruises, and merchandise. They need to keep those properties in the public consciousness to keep that money rolling in, and for a period that was in live action remakes.
You get up to two years of active discussion of the property: “Oh, did you hear they’re remaking ____________?” “______ is playing _______!” “Did you see the trailer?” And then everyone goes to see it (during non-apocalyptic times) almost reflexively. They’re not actually excited about it. They’re not going to talk about it much afterward. By at most a month later most will have forgotten they’ve even seen it. Most will never think about it again, and almost no one will rewatch.
But, it reminds you that these are indelible cultural bedrock classics. Even if the remake is terrible, it’ll only serve to elevate the original in memory. “Scar’s Be Prepared was awful in the remake. It was the best song in the original!” It’s one more time of you reminding yourself that the classics matter.
And all the money those remakes make is just extra frosting.
Not very many people like the live action remakes, and no one prefers them, but but that’s not the point. They’re not popular. They’re successful.
“The first Lion King—an original story, though it heavily ripped off the ’60s anime series Kimba The White Lion, as well as Hamlet—came out in the midst of Disney’s fabled Renaissance.”I’m sorry, but I hate that people compare this to Hamlet when the story is closer to Henry IV.
You mean to tell me that leaving well enough alone is a good idea?I am so “shocked”.
This is such a baffling project to me. I know the live-action remakes were a slam dunk cash cow, but at least all of the others had, you know, actual actors. What on earth is the point of doing photo-realistic animals to just casually (and realistically) stroll across the savanna?
I’m sure the only reason Favreau took this job was to:A) stay in Disney’s good graces, thus buying him capital to do his own stuffB) Experiment with cutting edge technology and
C) Obviously make a crap ton of money.
When the creative force behind the movie doesn’t seem to give a shit, how could the audience possibly?
The point was to make 1.5 billion dollars, and it succeeded in that extremely easily. I thought it was extremely dull and boring, except for Timon and Pumba, but Disney loved it
I wasn’t bothered by the remake until “Be Prepared.” For me, Jeremy Irons’ performance was a show-stopper, and the new rendition just felt neutered and devoid of villainous energy. The rest of the movie kind of collapsed after that.
I mean Lion King wasn’t “live action” in any sense of the word. It was photorealistic CGI, the fact that even now sites like this can’t seem to understand that is just sad. You write about movies, try actually understanding what you are writing about.
The closest the article comes to calling the 2019 The Lion King “live action” is when Tom mentions that Disney marketed it as a live action movie, which is objectively true. Even the headline has the good sense to put “live action” in ironic quote marks.You comment on internet articles, try actually reading the articles you’re commenting about. (No offense meant, it was just too obvious a snappy comeback to leave lying there…)
Try actually reading the article, before you start knee jerk bitching. The author points this out about a dozens times.
I have been saying for years, basically ever since Maleficent was announced, that Disney ought to embrace its cartoon origins and remake one of its live-action misfires as an animated feature, with The Black Hole as the ideal candidate for such treatment.No doubt I’m so invested in this idea because I’m an animation fanatic, and I hate the spectacle of the company most responsible for the artistic and commercial success of animation in the USA seemingly turning its back on its own history by putting out live-action (and “live-action”) versions of many of its most iconic cartoons. Even disregarding my biases, though, I think my idea has a good deal of merit.
So like, Jon Favreau is a solid director. But he never struck me as a guy who had any interest or real vision for big spectacle. It’s weird to me he got Jungle Book to lead to this. But like, was it his fault? Or Disney’s fault to be this lifelike and forcing him?Aladdin was a weird piece too. There is basically nothing in it that would tell you it’s a Guy Ritchie movie.
There have been some interesting things in Disney remakes. The Maleficent films were a reasonable attempt at female-centric fantasy epics (in contrast to the very male Tolkien). Cruella was insipid but had interesting ideas, and again a female cast. Pete’s Dragon as you say was fun, with a good cast and left-field music (Will Oldham!) Alice in Wonderland could have been good: Tim Burton reinvents Alice, how was it so bad? But they seem to have increasingly honed their algorithms and managerial control so nothing interesting or risky will make it onto screen.
Hypothetical … Lions and other well-known African animals have been photographed and video taped for decades. Disney could spend untold Disney dollars to acquire various snippets of all of these nature documentaries. Edit together and make a Frankenmovie, with various Hollywood talent providing voice acting and narration. That is the “live action” Lion King film. Think Planet Earth but with Donald Glover or something. That movie probably sucks, but maybe not? Shrug…Anyway, as everyone has said… this movie is a dud.
Toy Story 4 undoes a lot of what came before it. Why is Disney about this?
Toy Story 4 was…not a great movie at all. It made little sense, it was all focused on Woody, putting Buzz in the background, and they made him do the one thing he would never do: leave and think of himself first. I was utterly bored by the movie and fell asleep twice in theaters to it. This is coming from a kid who grew up with the Toy Story franchise being a huge part of his life and seeing Toy Story 3 in college and absolutely loving it
Disney doesn’t want to try. They just want to make money in the most blatantly exploiting nostalgic, easy and sad way.Funny how they promoted themselves as the dream factory but like a factory they just churn it out all the same. You can see it in the Star Wars films and every Disney cartoon live-action remake. The Marvel films are in danger of it as long as they’re willing to take risks and not backtrack even if it doesn’t work.But it is also as funny when these reboots and rebooted CGI live action versions of them were first released people seem to fall over to bend the knee to Disney and go on and on at how brilliant they are.
I’ve seen the Lion King (94) more times then I can count. Not only was the “live action” version lacking any sort of character but it was off putting to watch a movie so close to the original but lacking the familiar beats. The closest experience I can compare it too, is when I saw the Empire Strikes Back Special Edition in theaters, I had seen ESB countless times and listed to the deluxe soundtrack, when it came to the escape from cloud city scene, I knew it beat for beat, so when the inserted Vader shuttle stuff appeared it threw off the flow. I think the live action Aladdin fairs a bit better because it somewhat tries to do it’s own thing. I think where the live action movies really fail is the musical choreography. The only musical number I really enjoyed comparable to the animated version was the Gaston song in Beauty and the Beast.
I watched 5 mins of it before going back to the beautiful original.
Is it okay to consider the original Lion King mediocre at best?
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There’s this one featurette that has Glover, Rogen, and Eichner singing Hakuna Matata, and you can just sense the lack of enthusiasm emanating off of three great performers whose respective works are chock full of the creative exuberance lacking here.Also… this is probably the only time I’ll ever say this sentence… Seth Rogen should’ve been replaced by Josh Gad, because Seth is NOT a singer.
what truly baffles me is that Disney already tried to do live action remakes of their classic films 20+ years before this batch and nobody cared! Does anyone remember the 90s live action Jungle Book or the live action 101 Dalmatians??
“When I rewatched the remake a few nights ago, one of my cats was absolutely hypnotized—”That point when you realize you can disregard this person’s opinion on most anything.
Always thought they brought out the re-releases in order to renew the IP protections.
Excellent column as always, Tom! We’re almost up to present day with Popcorn Champs, what’s next? I’d love your take on the history of cinematic Sci-Fi. Any chance of a Sci-Fi or Sci/Fan film history column?