Now I have to watch this at some point when I get home. I’ll have to scour Netflix and Amazon Prime to see where it is.
the cast sounds pretty good.
Disney animation: “How can we make these animals look like people?”
Disney live-action remakes: “How can we make these animals look like animals?”
I really don’t see the point of this. I’m sure you can find comparison images online, but they took the humanized, relatable expressions from the original animation, and transformed them into dead-eyed animals whose mouths move to the dialogue. It’s one step up from Mr. Ed.
I suppose the point is to try and appeal to a new generation of kids for which simple 2d cartoons don’t hold much appeal? From a purely practical perspective, if this gets young people to like wild animals in Africa and even to a tiny degree care about their continued existence I am all for it.
Although I really feel like Disney should be donating a % of their profits from this movie to a wildlife charity, as their animals are so close to the actual look of these animals they should in some way benefit from their likeness being on screen to make lots of $.
As the parent of two kids myself, I have seen zero indication that kids are biased against 2D animation. But even assuming that’s true, then why not redo the movie in the style of Zootopia or something like that, where the animals look realistic but still maintain some sense of character??
By making everything look completely realistic, I would argue that they are crapping all over the art of the original film. The character emotions are gone, the facial expressions are gone, and I’ll bet ten bucks that stylized sequences like this are absent from the new movie:
You…I…um…you understand that these are just generic animals, right??
If you want an opinion on why live-action remakes are bad, there’s always Lindsay Ellis with a thorough (read: long) analysis of Beauty and the Beast:
Haha yes… Disney makes a big deal about how they are trying to help wildlife etc., they have a conservation fund and make nature documentaries and so on. I was just thinking it would have been a great gesture to in some way have the success of this movie tied to the continued existence of the endangered animals they are depicting on screen.
Kids these days read manga and watch anime. They’re fine with stylized 2d.
Sure, but will stylized 2d get them excited enough to beg their parents to buy overpriced tickets and take them to the cinema to see it?
I don’t know guys, I don’t have kids, but logically there has to be a reason that there are so many CGI kids/preteens stuff out there. Is it cheaper?
Because it’s easier to justify rereleasing the same movie if the form changes.
My kids love the animated films. He really enjoys Aladdin and Lion King too. At 5 the live action ones don’t grab him as much. They would rather watch Moana or Frozen than live action Beauty and the Beast
For TV, it’s cheaper, because you make the models once, and then can re-use them for hundreds of hours of content (e.g. Paw Patrol, Elena, Sofia)
For a feature film, I don’t know. A film has a lot more effort in the models, and also a lot more bespoke environments, animations, etc.
This. Plus you have a library of animations – you rarely need to add new ones. Just compose the character models with the background, choose your animations, set the lighting, and presto. It’s the cheapness of the Hanna Barbera cartoons, with great quality animations and no need for cheap tweening.
I think we’ve reached a point where the movies are cheaper too (adjusted for inflation and all that), if you compare the painstaking process of animating the old-school high quality Disney movies to the process of creating a CGI movie nowadays. Hyper-realistic movies like this Lion King are still very expensive, but most of the new fully-CGI movies use stylized 3d models that are cheaper to produce and animate.
Yep. I have 4 kids. They all enjoy animation and are or were not put off in the least by 2D animation.
Now 2 of the teenage boys stopped going to see any Disney/ Pixar / DreamWorks movies whatever the style because they are boys and too cool and busy for that stuff. :)
But I don’t know where you get the notion that kids these days like animated 2D movies any less than they did. I don’t see that tend either in any of the younger children of our friends.
Edit to add: anecdotally, or youngest, our daughter is much more excited about going to see animated movies then those live action remakes.
Easier, and, more importantly to the corporate suits, the surest way to guarantee large profits. These guys are risk adverse and the lowest risk is to keep repackaging the money makers.
I’d need to dig around the Google Pages of ye olden times, but wasn’t the whole reason Disney closed down its traditional 2D animation because Atlantis, Treasure Planet & Home on the Range all bombed? At the time Shrek & Pixar had established new box office trends, thus 2D was deemed out-dated.
Princess and the Frog was a late attempt to resurrect 2D a few years later but it didn’t get much success, so just confirmed that 3D was the future. (Even though Ghibli alone clearly showed that there was a market for WELL MADE 2D movies…)
That rings a bell. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was indeed the corporate thinking at the time.
I think the introduction of 3D in movies is very similar to how it worked out in gaming. It was incredibly impressive at first – I remember being blown away by Toy Story, and then enjoying the advances of each new Pixar iteration. But now that it’s mainstream technology, I don’t care about 3D anymore. It’s about the quality of the movie itself, and the animation - whether 2D or 3D - doesn’t really matter, so long as it’s done sufficiently well.
If I had to compare the two, I’d say 3D animation is very good at being consistent. Every frame of animation looks good, because for the computer, every frame is the same. 2D’s strength is at being far more expressive – the animators get to have far more range to express emotions well, at the cost of some frames not being as good as others. Also, 2D ages well, while 3D always seems to age badly.
I wonder what the production costs, of say, Into the Spider-verse or Lego Movie are compared to more traditional animation.
Although cost clearly isn’t the only factor, or Laika wouldn’t exist at all.