FILM

5 Insane Live-Action Disney Movies We Want to Actually Exist

These great live-action Disney movies could be just over the horizon.

Kristen Bell, Santino Fontana - Love Is an Open Door (From "Frozen"/Sing-Along)

Disney's all about two things right now: live-action remakes and sequels—or, whenever possible, doing both at the same time.

But eventually, Disney's going to run out of beloved, animated classics to drag into the real world. Luckily for them, we've composed a list of some of our best live-action Disney movie ideas, which they're welcome to mine when the ol' well of hackery runs dry. All we ask for in return is a mere footnote in the credits. So while you recover from the live-action Lion King and wait for the live-action The Little Mermaid, keep in mind that these great Disney movies could be just over the horizon:

Live-Action Frozen

frozen olafDisney

Live-action Frozen isn't a matter of "if" so much as "when." It's happening, and when it does, you can bet your bottom dollar that the casting choices are going to be controversial. After all, who could Disney possibly cast as Olaf? Josh Gad would be far too big for the Olaf costume, so he's not an option. They could probably get Peter Dinklage to do it, but he most likely wouldn't want to denigrate his career like that. Maybe they could size Olaf up a lot and cast John Cena, but at what point would he go from "goofy mascot" to "snow golem that must be destroyed?"

Keep ReadingShow less
FILM

Disney Doesn't Care About Your Childhood: “The Lion King” Is Just a CGI Flex

Photo-realistic lions singing to each other is an uncanny valley experience you'll never got used to.

Are we sure this isn't a nature documentary?

Disney

The Lion King "live-action" remake, visually speaking, is an artistic and technological marvel.

Every single character in this film is depicted as a photo-realistic animal, right down to the wrinkles on Timone's nose and the tufts of dirt in Rafiki's hair. Even the characters' movements are completely rooted in reality, with each digital character having weight and presence on screen so convincingly real that you honestly forget you're looking at CG characters at all. The attention to detail in this film is truly awe-inspiring.

Look. At. Those. Hairs.Disney

But while the incredibly talented VFX team at Disney rooted every animal in reality, the basic demands of The Lion King story seemed to have been a secondary concern—namely, the singing and speaking. The Lion King is a musical, after all, and what we got in the 1994 original were characters who had moving lips and big, expressive eyes to illustrate their emotions and motivations—you know, the kind of thing you can do with hand-drawn animation. Since Disney decided to have a completely realistic take on these characters, a lot of that personality and expression just doesn't come across. When Mufasa and Simba are having a conversation, for example, it just looks like two lions staring at each other with human voices coming vaguely from their direction. Their mouths move up and down, but their dead, beady little eyes show nothing but emptiness. It's weird.

Which begs the question: Was this the best story to tell with photo-realistic animals? The Lion King is essentially Hamlet the musical, and most would assume that a literal lion might not be able to pull off the emotion and charisma required of a Shakespeare story. With that being said, The Lion King 2019 tries to stay beat-for-beat with the original animated classic. If you look at the original movie's runtime compared to the 2019 remake, you'll notice there's an additional 30 minutes in the remake. Most of that time goes to the first act, which was my favorite part of the movie, with baby Simba and baby Nala simply playing and romping about. Granted, this definitely dragged on way too long before we got the story really going—but c'mon. Did you see the stills from this movie? Baby Simba is cute as f**k.

I mean...Disney

Can the whole movie be about baby Simba?Disney

There were also some character changes in this film that really elevate the experience—namely Timon and Pumbaa. Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen bring these intensely realistic characters to life in a way that's sorely missing in the remake's other performances. The two have such delightful chemistry that it made me want to just stick with them for the rest of the movie. The decision to add their off-the-cuff jokes to the script was a commendable choice from director Jon Favreau, who clearly saw the talents of these two performers and let them take the lead.

For instance, my favorite line comes at the end of the "Simba growing up" montage, right when it looks like it's going to be a shot-for-shot remake of the original. When Simba continues to sing after the music stops, Pumbaa quips, "You've gained 400 pounds since you started!" I didn't think a Disney movie could be so tastefully meta, but I was pleasantly surprised.

I just want to watch these three for two hours <3Disney

The heroes of the movie.IMDB

As for the rest of the performances, everyone is pretty good. John Oliver plays a great Zazu; but again, his performance is neutered by the fact that his character doesn't have lips: It just looks like a very normal bird flapping hysterically at lions for two hours. Mufasa is actually great, because James Earl Jones has the presence of God in his voice, so at least that loans itself well to watching a photo-realistic king of the jungle roam around the screen. Scar is also good; there have been complaints online about Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance compared to that of Jeremy Irons, but at least Ejiofor's quiet confidence is fitting for his commanding photo-realistic character. Frankly, the animated Scar had so much dimension and expression that complemented Irons' vocal articulation, you're just not going to be able to replicate that expression in CG—let's not forget when Will Smith unfortunately tried it.

#HyenaGangEntertainment Weekly

Since this film is technically a musical, let's briefly touch on the musical performances: They're fine. It really seems like they were an afterthought, and I can't really blame Favreau for this. This biggest challenge to overcome was making literal singing lions seem convincing on screen, and I think he did the best he could. Still, the musical numbers from the original are so poorly replicated here that if they were something you loved from the original, you're going to be seriously disappointed. "I Just Can't Wait to Be King," the song that really kicks off the musical energy in the film, is very lackluster in its presentation. Remember that the hand-drawn original had colorful spectacles and dramatic actions, like Simba and Nala riding on the backs of f**cking ostriches and a cohort of zebras saluting them, culminating with a massive animal tower made of parading elephants, giraffes, gazelles, anteaters, and flamingos, with Simba and Nala standing on top! In comparison, this remake has Simba and Nala running around a pond, with those same animals there but not seeming to notice them: not really the same impact. They also dare to cut down one of the best songs from the original, "Be Prepared," to a 30-second chant, which I take personal grievance with. With the last song of the film, the quintessential "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," Faverou decided to have the whole song sung in Simba and Nala's heads, probably to avoid the awkward lip-syncing issues. It ends up feeling like a Nat Geo documentary with Beyoncé's vocals in the background.

Oh look... some regular a** lions. How romantic.Disney

Surprisingly, the most disappointing performances come from Donald Glover and Beyoncé as Simba and Nala. I would guess they were both picked for their star-power and not necessarily for their voice acting abilities. Glover plays a pretty forgettable Simba, who lacks the headstrong and playful personality that Mathew Broderick brought to the original. That's not a huge gripe compared to Beyonce's performance, though. I'm honestly not sure what happened there. All of her lines are spoken as overly-enunciated statements rather than normal conversation, and it's so, so distracting. At first I couldn't understand why the first interaction between Simba and Nala is so awkward. There are long beats of painful silence between their lines, which gives you too much time to remember that you're looking at CG lions with inexplicably human voices… And then you keep thinking: "Oh, sh*t…Beyoncé's in this movie!"

Mufasa is a badass, even in photorealism.Disney

Honestly, this movie is a lot of fun if you just enjoy it for what it is and don't expect it to capture the same wonder of the original. This movie is a big creative leap for Disney, but it's not exactly what any of us were expecting. The CG effects and character design in The Lion King 2019 are the absolute best I've ever seen, which is enough for me to want to see it again. But if you care more about seeing your beloved musical numbers and characters brought to new life on screen, you might not want to put down $15 to see this in theaters. If you've got kids, take them, and you won't be bored. But if you're emotionally invested, maybe wait for this to drop on Disney Plus in a few months. After all, this is just the latest flavor of 90s nostalgia for Disney to exploit, and amidst the company's ever-growing arsenal of remade animated classics, this one is sure to make a heap of money.

Rating: ⚡⚡⚡/5

The live-action Aladdin remake is what you get when you take what white people think the Middle East is and colonize it with peppy, witless background actors.

I don't need to set up the premise of Aladdin for you; you already know the story. And that's what the new Disney live-action remake assumes, too, skipping character introductions in the beginning for a montage of the hot-spots in the fictional city of Agrabah - from the Sultan's palace overlooking the sprawling city to the Cave of Wonders with its Mufasa face. It's a sweeping CGI landscape, and after the nauseating roller coaster we meet our hero, Aladdin, played by newcomer Mena Massoud. He's running from the palace guards and bumps into Jasmine in the market, played by Disney Channel's Naomi Scott; he immediately charms her. Their chemistry is as instant and intolerable as a TV dinner.

All this action takes place on a painfully tacky sound stage, bustling with vaguely Middle-Eastern-looking people of all different kinds. Beards and burkas, eyeliner and turbans; it's like the wardrobe department raided the "Oriental" section of a Halloween Adventure store. And that's what the painful points of this film are: its creative failures. The Disney Aladdin story in itself is an American-made bastardization of Middle Eastern and Oriental cultures blended together to be consumed. Much like Pocahontas and Mulan, it was a story written by white people to sell toys to all the little boys and girls of America. So no one should expect this movie to depict literal Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or Lebanon, or a whole host of other cultures that are being flimsily referenced. But to anyone who has actually been to the Middle East… the environment looks more like an amusement park attraction than a place anyone could conceivably live in. Guy Ritchie puts so much effort into imitating the world of the animated original that the film misses opportunities to shine on its own.

Massoud does a serviceable job as Aladdin, as his handsome blank expression becomes endearing after a while. But Scott steals the spotlight with her genuinely compelling performance as a politically-minded princess who longs to be sultan. As the movie chugs along, you start to get the sense that this should have been Jasmine's movie. Her character motivation is much stronger than Aladdin's, who ultimately just wants to impress some chick he met one day earlier. Luckily, Jasmine gets plenty of screentime to show off her acting and singing chops, which provide the only breaks from obnoxiously noticeable autotune.

Surprisingly, Will Smith is pretty good in this movie. That is to say, when he isn't the weird, uncanny-valley/blue-man-group Will Smith we glimpsed in the film's trailers, he holds it down as the Genie. The most glaring moments of disillusionment come when Robin William's iconic one-liners are recited word for word. For instance, Smith just can't quite capture the comedic timing Williams had with his "teeny-tiny living space" line. The musical number "Friend Like Me" was particularly painful, but that might have been my stomach adjusting to the sight of a blue, photo-realistic, steroided Will Smith floating on a cloud. With that being said, when Smith isn't blue, he's fun to watch. His best moments come from playing the classic, 6'2, lovable Will Smith. There's a particularly phenomenal scene in which Aladdin is attempting to impress the princess as Prince Ali, and Smith's ad-libs were the freshest part of the entire film. I won't spoil them, but you'll be genuinely laughing the entire time.

Should you see this movie? Eh, sure. It offers some good new ideas that I would have loved to see explored more, like Genie hanging out among the humans and Jasmine's growth as a royal leader. Those concepts stand up well on their own and allow the actors to leverage their very obvious strengths. But director Guy Ritchie either didn't have a vision for this film or he wasn't allowed by the Disney powers that be to realize it. So instead, we have cartoonish acting, hokey sets, and very, very low stakes in a movie that should be a mystical adventure. If you're not too concerned with something new and just want to watch a bunch of faux-Arabs onscreen acting out your favorite childhood movie, then this live-action remake of Aladdin is for you.

Rating: ⚡⚡