What Lion King’s Remake Doesn’t Understand
Remaking a movie is commonplace in Hollywood. It’s to be expected nowadays, and it’s foolish to think it’ll ever end because that’s just how the business has been since the beginning.
And that’s fine, in my opinion anyways.
It opens up new ways for someone to explore a timeless classic, or to put a spin on something that no one ever thought of. When the minds working on the remake deviate just far enough from the source material and make the remake something of their own creation, then we could likely expect something bold and exciting.
Though if those minds instead want to be safer and simply retell a story through a new lens of creativity, then that too is fine, because then you’re introducing a new generation of people to something they’d otherwise be unaware of.
Even if the film fails on either of these aspects of retelling that classic tale, the remake tends to remind you of what made the original so fantastic.
For example, the Lion King Remake.
It’s an arbitrary piece of shit.
Yet the fans, the ones who watched the original as kids with an unfiltered bias, the ones who grew up and are now working on animation and art to this day are now acknowledging the brilliance of the original. The colors, the shapes, the emotions, all of it evocative and with purpose.
The remake is realistic, bland, dull, boring, and worst of all, it’s not fooling anyone. Which is the point of hyper-realism, yet somehow this point never came across to the people of Disney. It’s odd though, because for some reason they are somehow thinking “realistic” equals “better than”.
Which is horse shit.
Though I don’t blame Disney for going this route. As I said, remakes are commonplace, and CGI is the new hit thing that people are getting better and better at with every new movie that abuses it. This is the obvious step forward with a remake of the Lion King. Yet at some point, there was a loss of soul when it came to the development of CG.
It’s an odd trend with movies nowadays to make things as realistic as possible as to blend in to reality, to fool the audience and to make them wonder in awe whether they’re looking at real life, or at a CG model. Yet the thing I feel the people behind these movies don’t understand is that, well, nobody’s getting fooled. Nobody will ever get fooled, because we’re not stupid. The human brain is great at identifying what’s real, and what’s bullshit.
Throughout the entire trailer I thought to myself how dreary everything looked. How dark the movie looked. How miserable and boring the environment looked. Is it because the film itself is a grittier, edgier movie than the original? I don’t think so, I mean look —
Simba, Timone and Pumba are all singing. Yeah I know it’s hard to tell, but they’re doing the same musical number as the original, albeit without the flashiness and the jovial nature of the original. If you look at their mouths you can see they are actually singing. So the lightheartedness is still there, and I’m assuming by the trailer itself it is an actual shot-for-shot remake. Then why is it so dreary?
Because “real life” is boring.
When you detach soul from a movie and opt in for a more realistic approach, you lose color. When you aim to show off your tech, you lose the soul of your film.
Now I’m not saying that this film needs to lose the realistic approach, that’s fine, but the movie and the people working on it need to stop trying to fool the audience. There will never be a movie in the world that could ever truly fool their audience when a large video game character is talking on the screen. A good example of this was Avatar, and how the cast and the producers paraded around how beautiful and marvelous their CG tech was, yet in exchange for beautiful visuals and stunning CG, we were given a bland and boring film that nobody even remembers.
This trend of “realism” over substance is a dangerous one. Although it’s not completely terrible. It can work.
Maybe I’m speaking ahead of myself here, but the Detective Pikachu film is a movie that has shown through its trailers how “realism” doesn’t have to mean “realistic”.
Yes, all of the Pokemon are designed to be as realistic as possible, we real fur texture, realistic scales, crinkley skin, dull colors etc. Yet not once have I actually seen a loss of soul, because while the designs are updated for the realistic setting the movie takes place in, the makers of the film chose not to stray far from the original designs. As ugly as some of them may look, you can still identify who they are. With some, they look exactly as they originally do—
This translation actually works advantageously because it goes back to what I was saying.
This is not a remake of a film, but it is a re-imagining of a beloved franchise through a new, creative lens. It is allowing people, both old and new to the series, to experience something they have never before seen on the big screen. It works because it’s a new point of view, a fresh point of view, and not because it looks good, but because it’s something we’re interested in.
Nobody is interested in a shot for shot, bland, boring remake of a film that looked prettier and more colorful 25 years ago.
Everyone is far more interested in a film with an original story that is filled to the brim with colorful, albeit ugly looking monsters, that are portrayed in a way that has never been done before. In this sense, Detective Pikachu is a bold, bold film.
(Note: I will still stand by this statement even if it turns out Detective Pikachu is a bad film, and The Lion King a good film, or vice versa. There will never be another film quite like Detective Pikachu in a long, long time.)
