Flickering Myth

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Why is everyone so upset about the live-action Lion King remake?

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So because The Jungle Book was only 98% computer animation, that makes it okay?

The human character in question is Neel Sethi, who brilliantly and beautifully plays the mancub Mowgli in the film. It’s not just a superb performance because Sethi conveys an amazing range of emotions that pull you into the movie, but he does so by acting against virtually nothing. There are amazing behind-the-scenes videos for The Jungle Book which show Sethi on a plank in water singing “The Bear Necessities” to a disembodied Bill Murray voice and director Favreau, but you would never question in the film that he isn’t in that stream with Baloo. Favreau perfectly blended the real-world Sethi with the computer animated Baloo to the point where no one bats an eyelid.

As pointed out in the above tweet, The Lion King won’t have this element as there are no human characters. But saying it’s a CGI remake really undermines the technology and the methods used to bring real-world actors into animated characters. For The Jungle Book, Favreau utilised motion capture on certain actors while recording their lines to mimic their facial movements. On set, Sethi would interact with actors in blue suits against blue screen that, on Favreau’s cameras, would have the pre-visual version of the character mapped over. “You’d see the kid with a guy in a blue suit, or a puppeteer, then with Simulcam you’d see the bear walking next to him,” Favreau told Wired. These methods could be used for The Lion King, which you can guarantee will also have the photo-real backgrounds, character renderings and visuals perfected by The Jungle Book. Does this make it a CGI remake? I personally don’t think so. This won’t look like a Pixar movie, this will look like a live-action film.

Perhaps its a case of semantics.

But this technology is becoming more prevalent in films, and is becoming a standard practice for directors and actors. Not only that, but its becoming normality for us as film fans. No longer are we praising Andy Serkis for his motion capture performance as Gollum, and are instead congratulating him for his acting as Caesar in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. We’ve never called Maz Kanata a motion captured character in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it was simply a performance by Lupita Nyong’o. When I saw The Jungle Book, I didn’t see a CGI bear made up of zeros and ones, I saw Bill Murray. I saw Christopher Walken in King Louie, I saw Idris Elba in Shere Khan. The same way I’ll see Dan Stevens as The Beast, and Emma Thompson as Mrs. Potts. No doubt the same way I’ll see whichever actors they choose to play Simba, Mufassa and Scar.

And let’s be honest, Sethi may have been on a set in front of a blue screen to deliver lines of dialogue, but it wasn’t him doing all the flips through trees. That was all done by computers.

This, I feel, is a much more interesting point to raise about the movie. Films are being remade each and every year, but some get more hate than others. No one really made a fuss about the remake of Point Break, but everyone lost their minds over Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters. An English-language remake of I Saw The Devil gets some praise, while Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween is torn asunder, as were the remakes for A Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th before a single frame was shot.

When The Jungle Book was announced in 2013 there wasn’t a lot of uproar, especially when you compare it to the reaction yesterday to The Lion King‘s announcement. This could very well be tied into the fact the majority of people complaining were children when The Lion King was first released in 1995 and therefore saw it in theatres. There is an attachment there, a nostalgic connection. And yet, oddly, no one is kicking up much of a stink about Disney’s live-action prequel to Aladdin, which was released a couple of years before The Lion King. Perhaps there is that generation of children who weren’t quite old enough to enjoy Aladdin, but were the perfect age for The Lion King and those are the ones upset. Angus Houvouras argues in this article, “nostalgia is the enemy of creativity”, and this can also be applied to those complaining about remaking a film they like.

Which brings us to our final reply:

What is it about The Lion King that people are so attached to? Is it the characters? The story? Elton John’s soundtrack? What separates this movie from all of the other Disney movies that came out around the same time?

Listen, I love The Lion King. I can remember vividly sitting in the cinemas to watch it and being blown away, I remember what an event the home entertainment release felt like, and I can remember the frustrations that came with playing the “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” level on the Mega Drive video game tie-in. And while I personally think Aladdin is a better film, I can see what makes The Lion King so special. But that doesn’t mean I’m against the idea of someone like Jon Favreau doing a live-action remake of it. To me that sounds great. Having loved his take on The Jungle Book, I’m excited to see what he brings to this story and these characters.

Most likely, we’ll look back at this initial uproar and protest in a few years when the film is released and wonder why people were so upset. That is until Disney announce the live-action Frozen and we can do this all over again. As Scott Wampler puts it:

Luke Owen is the Deputy Editor of Flickering Myth and the co-host of The Flickering Myth Podcast and Scooperhero News. You can follow him on Twitter @ThisisLukeOwen and read his weekly feature The Week in Star Wars.

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