Disney's artistic bankruptcy

Of all the Disney's mediocre remakes, I ( Jenni writing solo again) never thought it would be the Lion King that would actually make me so angry I wanted to bash a Disney excecutive's head in. Don't get me wrong, I love the original animation, but when I was a kid it was always the one I loved the least of the first four Disney reneissance films. However, this movie awoke a visceral reaction in me that the other remakes did not, even though they are all pretty bad. I would say, outside of Cats, this remake might be the worst movie I have seen from 2010's. And even Cats was gloriously, entertainingly horrible. This other cat movie, not so much. It is a lifeless, murky mess where you can't see anything when it's dark and the world is completely flat of distinctive colour even in daylight. At least the other remakes had some human faces that showed *some* emotion; here it is like looking at an empty vessel, devoid of any kind of recognizable emotion. Sigh. And Disney used to be really good at manipulating people's emotions with their blatant appeal to feelings.  

I make it no secret that I believe Disney has really gone downhill artistically since they adopted the "no more hand-drawn animation" rule in the 2010's. Even though most of their offerings in the 2000's were crap, I could still admire the artwork that went into their hand-drawn animation style. CGI does not offer me the same visual pleasure. In fact, CGI, unlike traditional animation, is fairly limited in what it can show - it can't switch animation styles all that much and looks mostly the same, the expressions in characters' faces can't really be exaggerated to the same extent and the colours are always flatter. Hand-drawn animation ain't perfect either by any measure and it is much more expensive to make, but it holds far more visual interest and potential to beauty than CGI ever has. To me, CGI has always been exactly the same as all other special effects - something that should enhance the film's visuals and not replace existing effects (be they actors, make-up, practical effects, etc.), which seems to be its purpose in modern cinema. By itself, CGI is nothing but one special effect among others and if one insists making the entire movie of CGI, The Lion King remake is what it will look like at its worst.   

The film differs in no meaningful way from its original animated source. That is a problem that plagues most Disney remakes but it is especially egregious in their Lion King remake. The events are the same, the music's the same and most of the characters are the same, except it all looks much much worse. I do not think I have ever seen anything more devoid of emotion than this film. There is not a shred of sincerity in this movie - which granted, Disney does not always have in their offerings, but even in those cash grabs I could at least admire the artwork. Not the case here. The film constantly slaps you in the face with how unbearably ugly it looks. That should not be - the original Lion King is one of the best looking films Disney ever made. It has breath-taking colours with sharp and detailed animation. Though it's no wonder that Lion King looks pretty good, when it took its inspiration from probably Disney's best-looking animation ever, Bambi. And Bambi, though its story and characters aren't the greatest, looks so damn beautiful that it makes you cry. And when we are talking about films, aesthetic matters. CGI is a big part why a lot of films nowadays have cheap aesthethic. They look like crap - colour is hard to distinguish even when it is supposedly daylight, when it is dark one can barely see anything and in general a lot of the background looks blurry. I've found that the older I've gotten, the more I have started to care about movies' aesthetic. The characters still reign supreme, of course, but bad visuals can affect characters as well - like in this remake. It is extremely hard to feel anything for characters that show no emotion whatsoever. At least in CGI - animations the characters do show emotion and real animals are real, so they are way more impressive than computer-generated ones.

From Bambi. Look at that and tell me it's not amazing.

In the original Lion King the characters were already kinda all over the place but here they have somehow managed to make all of them worse. They basically took away Simba's would-be character arc about learning from one's past (which, granted, didn't go anywhere in the original animation) or accepting his divine call and responsibility as king. Especially the whole mystical divine kingship theme is greatly reduced in meaning in the live-action version, since everything looks so reality based. Scar is greatly diminished as a character already at the film's beginning by cutting his song (instead of in the last 3rd like the animation) and trying to make him into an even more obvious version of Claudius than the animation. The bond between father and son, Mufasa and Simba, is not really focused on in the beginning, so once the tragedy strikes, it is hard to feel for any of the characters involved. Also, the remake trying to make justifications for why the hyenas are evil turns out lazier than just making them evil. And this remake did something that I did not believe was even possible - it made Nala worse. Nala is already a non-character in the animation (as an adult) so making her even less so is quite a feat. I should have guessed that they'd erase all of Nala's personality when she was a kid, since erasing female characters' personalities is pretty much a feature in these Disney remakes, but it did surprise me that they managed to unimprove her adult self. Instead, Nala is a nagger all throughout the movie and affects absolutely nothing or nobody in the story. Timon & Pumba I sort of enjoyed, but even they have this strange cynical undertone that they never had in the animation. All in all, I think this film is a perfect encapsulation of both Disney's complete creative collapse and the state of modern Hollywood cinema - endless sequels, prequels, remakes (or "reimaginations") and even when something original is occasionally thought up, it is usually full-to-the-brim CGI. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I see it as a true tradgedy of the film industry that so much hand-crafted talent, like practical effects and traditional animation, has been almost completely replaced by CGI, where the work might not be as rewarding and fullfilling as creating things with one's own hands.