Disney has remade several of its classics recently. An upcoming remake of "The Lion King," however, is stirring emotions.
Hollywood has been remaking classics with new digital bells and whistles for years now. The Grinch got a CGI sheen. CGI stands for computer-generated imagery, and refers to the special visual effects that can be created using computer software.
Other classics have been remade using CGI. Mowgli's forest, from "The Jungle Book," turned into a pixelated forest. Now, 25 years after "The Lion King" made its way into people's hearts, footage of a return to Pride Rock has left some viewers a bit "shook."
Disney released the first trailer for next year's "Lion King" remake over the Thanksgiving weekend. The remake trades in the 1994 original's 2-D animation for CGI re-creation. After more than 224 million views within the first day, a debate was sparked. Just how is this a "live-action" film when everything on the screen looks like a painted pixel?
Some viewers tweeted their confusion over the trailer. Perhaps some were expecting a live-action remake of "The Lion King" to be more like Julie Taymor's smash-hit Broadway musical. The musical featured human performers in elaborate costumes. Also, some users noticed how similar the trailer looked to parts of the original movie. Some posted shot-by-shot comparisons of the original and the remake. Is It "Live Action"?
When "Aquaman" director James Wan tweeted his appreciation of the trailer, he used the term "live action." This spurred further opinions about what to call Disney's latest re-creation. There seems to be a need to put a name to such pioneering hybrids in filmmaking. The talk eventually moves to awards. How will awards jurors classify "The Lion King," which is due out in July 2019? A related debate came up when "Avatar" was released. The Visual Effects Society honored James Cameron's 2009 movie for "animated character in a live-action feature motion picture." As the Oscar-nominated writer-director Dean DeBlois said, "'Avatar' has bridged the gap so much between what live-action did and what animation traditionally did." He added, "There's nothing you can't do in terms of creating a performance." So much of the conversation around the blurring of CGI "motion-capture" and animation is about the human performance. Motion-capture is recording an actor's movements and then doing creating over the movements. Some filmmakers make a distinction between an actor's performance that gets a CGI paint job and a person modeling for an animator. For example, actor Andy Serkis did motion-capture when he portrayed Caesar in the "Planet of the Apes" trilogy and Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. Jon Favreau is the director of the "Lion King" remake, which stars Donald Glover, James Earl Jones and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. In 2016, Favreau's remake of "The Jungle Book" relied on CGI animation. Animals and landscapes were created on computers. Neel Sethi, who played Mowgli, gave viewers one anchor to a real life performance. No Humans
Now, some viewers struggle to classify "The Lion King" because of the lack of a human face. Rob Legato, "The Lion King's" visual special effects supervisor, said he didn't consider the remake an "animated movie." He said this is because of how Favreau uses virtual reality tools. For example, Favreau explores angles from different characters' viewpoints. Legato also said that "Jungle Book" felt "like a traditionally shot live-action movie, though it was filmed entirely on a bluescreen stage." The site Cartoon Brew doesn't agree. They wrote an article titled "Don't Let Disney Gaslight You: 'The Lion King' Remake Is An Animated Film." There are many new tools to make movies. One day, there may be no need to separate CGI films and animated films, but in the meantime, "The Lion King" is causing a great deal of confusion.
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