In the wake of my Disney-themed RCL speech, I am making a post about the recent Disney live-action epidemic. You walk into a world of high-budget cinematography, CGI, and set design, with the existing beautifully written narratives; what could go wrong?

Now, I don’t believe that live-action Disney films are inherently bad at all, but I don’t walk into these films expecting to be blown away the way I might have been while watching the original animated movies. There was a sort of magic to the original animated features; The Little Mermaid and Aladdin being two of my childhood favourites, that seemed to transport me to a whole new world under the sea. Anything that is remade or redone often doesn’t have the same effect unless they spin a new angle. Unless Disney decides to improve on the story, maybe by developing deeper themes, and displaying why making it live-action was a good idea, these films often can be pushed aside and labelled as recycled content.

As there is a lot of ground that can be covered, I will only focus on musicals for this post. Most issues arise with Disney’s attempts to turn animated musicals into live-action. The whole beauty of animation is that anything is possible, and so if you make a lobster sing, it’s fun and entertaining because every facial expression and the structure of the lobster itself can be manipulated. And because we know the Sebastian cannot be real, the fact that he is singing is easily digestible and hence we won’t bat an eye.  However, as soon as you take away that cartoonish aspect, and try to make characters that don’t behave realistically look realistic, then it may not achieve the same effect. The whole point of making anything an animated feature is to make possibilities boundless or appeal to a certain facet of storytelling that can best be told through animation. Unless turning it into a live action film serves any greater purpose or message, honestly it will just be harder to make a really memorable film.

As I am not a film expert, I cannot sit here and tell you what is a definite solution, but I do have some concluding thoughts. I would say maybe that the route that The Jungle Book took was clever. They took out most of the musical numbers and the ones they did leave in were dominated by Mowgli, a real life human non-CGI character, or the songs were short. Taking out the musical numbers helped make the movie way more fun to watch because there was a greater focus on the story, and the whole world of the jungle was brought to life. It actually improved on the suspenseful aspects of the story by being able to show it realistically. While I wouldn’t say it was a perfect film, I would say it is an example where changing to live-action actually contributed to the story-telling in a positive way.

Bottom-line is, if you are choosing to tell the same story again, show the audience why it is necessary to re-tell it. Are the messages socially relevant in our time? Are there aspects of the story that can be improved upon through live-action? Does it benefit the story-telling?