Soft Sand wrote:Wow, it's been a while - hi everyone!
The main criticism with which I agree would be the lack of emotion. I was surprised at the inconsistencies of even basic realistic feline body language as well - young Nala pins back her ears and crouches down after receiving the news from Scar, but young Simba is completely straight-faced and neutral (forward-facing ears, regular posture) after the stampede when Scar tells him to run away. It's very distracting at many points, especially if the voice actors cry while their characters don't show any bit of it visually. Timon seems to have gotten the better end of the stick but I'd imagine it's because real-life meerkats are just more naturally expressive.
And of course that begs the question, why make a "realistic" Lion King at all? Well, it doesn't seem to be realism itself that's the issue, because Disney themselves made a highly expressive photorealistic lion fifteen years ago with the Narnia films. Other examples of photorealistic but still expressive CGI animals include Detective Pikachu, Rocket Raccoon, Stuart Little, Guardians of Ga'Hoole, the list goes on... Sonic and Cats (2019) are a whole post for another day lmao
Can I just say that this was my feeling exactly. There's a scene in the beginning where the cubs are playing that has a ton of life and expression, and then the rest of the movie is just... bland. What happened? Not only that, but the voices don't match the character designs at all, and it creates this horrible tonal dissonance. I think a big part of it is because there is just no inflection in the model to make it 'act', but also just poor design choices all around. Perfect example, the hyenas are funny, but they look terrifying, so no one in our packed theater laughed at their jokes at all. And it's not like you can't make a photo realistic hyena look goofy - real hyenas are already pretty goofy.
The animation is also nothing spectacular. The models look amazing, don’t get me wrong, but they have no life, and they move so slow. It’s painfully slow – it feels like they added extra frames for some reason. The wildebeest stampede feels like it’s happening in slow motion, even though it’s supposed to be a really fast paced scene. When the lions leap they seem to hang in the air for an extra few miliseconds, and it looks really off.
But my personal biggest problem was the straight up theft of the original. This wasn’t a remake – it was a copy. The dialogue was almost identical, the story beats were the same (but delivered poorly because the models couldn’t emote, and so they had to say everything they feel rather than show it), the environments were the same, the layouts were the same, the lighting, the music, even the camera shots and animations were the same - whole sequences were straight up lifted out of the original. Sequences that were storyboarded and animated by other people. At a certain point it stops being an homage and becomes theft. If this movie succeeds it’s only because of other people who did the hard work, people who were dedicated to the craft of hand drawn animation and visual storytelling. And thinking about how a lot of those animators lost their jobs at Disney when they shut down their traditional animation department to focus on computer generated projects makes this whole movie even more of a low blow in my eyes. Like the original creators are still alive and still have to work to make a living, and you're just copying their work literally shot for shot. The same people who's work you deemed "obsolete" only a few years ago.
I’m not against remakes. If it helps to keep a story relevant, introducing it to a new generation of audiences, keeping it fresh, getting people talking and analyzing it again - I can get behind that. Revitalizing a story is a noble intention. But ‘The Lion King’ wasn’t in need of retelling. It’s not old enough that it needs to be updated, or reintroduced to audiences, there weren’t themes that went unexplored (at least none the remake felt like exploring), and people were still talking about the original – the original even got a theatrical rerelease a few years ago.
It’s sad, because the idea of remaking ‘The Lion King’ isn’t a bad one – it’s already just a rehashing of ‘Hamlet’ with themes lifted from ‘Bambi’. There’s a lot you could explore with that concept, and they handled it so poorly. It ultimately felt shallow and superficial to me: pretty to look at, but emotionally hollow. It really adds nothing to the original.
Also yes, hi, I did come on here just to rant about it, because everyone else seems to love this remake, and it annoys me that the filmmakers were too lazy to even bother creating different shots. Just because you slap a coat of paint on it doesn't mean you built the house.
