A couple of nights ago, I found myself swimming in the Gulf of Nostalgia. In the space of just a few hours, I was both the swimmer and the beachgoer watching those crazy kids nearly drown under the waves. The scene: Thundercloud Subs. The situation: simply ordering a sandwich to take to the summer production of Disney’s The Little Mermaid at the Zilker Park Hillside Theater.
In the midst of talking to the sandwich artist about our plans for the evening, Disney became a topic of conversation and she asked about the new Lion King 2019. Being the only one of the 3 in the conversation who had seen it, I suddenly felt an intense pressure to dance around my actual thoughts of it. The sandwich artist, who I had just met and would likely never see again, seemed to really want me to say great things about this movie. Maybe she even needed me to say great things about it. I gave her about as neutral a response as I could give: that it was nearly a shot-for-shot remake but was well-done. And then we left.
A couple of hours later, the play started. Even though it was really an adaptation of the Broadway play, itself an adaptation of the original Disney animated movie, it still had all the songs we had come to know and love. And in our group of 4, 3 of us had very strong memories tied to this movie. It wouldn’t take such a great leap of thought to say that when Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid hits theaters in a couple of years, we might be those sandwich artist people, asking someone who’s seen it just how it is, unknowingly forcing them to dance around the issue.
I know with these remakes just how dicey a proposition they are for audiences. But I’ve always come to remember one very important thing: we will always have the original. I don’t have a lot of faith in Rob Marshall to deliver. Or that Disney won’t find some way to make it all very, very weird. I mean, just HOW are they going to make it a movie entirely underwater and not look like a Disneyfied version of Aquaman? How are they going to make Javier Bardem into Triton underwater and not look like this guy:
Lion King 2019 has taught me, more than anything I’ve seen this year, the value of saying, “It’s not for me.” With every movie I see, I try to find something worthwhile out of it. The acting, the editing, the special effects. Maybe even the completely whacky go-for-broke choices. Because if every film requires an army of well-intentioned artists to wrestle into completion, shouldn’t I at least try and meet them halfway, somewhere, somehow?
From the minute it was clear to me Disney would be recycling (remaking feels a bit generous of a term) just about every one of their animated classics, I saw Lion King 2019 as the natural, pessimistic endpoint for just how far the exercise could go. It’s the only Disney animated classic (other than Bambi) which has no humans whatsoever. And I knew, before even seeing a frame of the film, that the natural slope from Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book – completely with near-photorealistic CGI animals and backgrounds – to Jon Favreau’s The Lion King would be a technical marvel, but artistically inert.
(Conspiracy Theory Time: from the time Disney bought Lucasfilm back in 2012, it’s been asked if and when a Star Wars TV show will ever come into existence. The party line has always been that such a show would be too expensive. In fact, in 2006, George Lucas himself had announced they had a Star Wars: Underworld series in the pipeline, but the obvious challenges remained: “It sits on the shelf. We have 50 hours (of scripts). We are trying to figure out a different way of making movies. We are looking for a different technology that we can use, that will make it economically feasible to shoot the show. Right now, it looks like the Star Wars features. But we have to figure out how to make it at about a tenth of the cost of the features, because its television. We are working toward that, and we continue to work towards that. We will get there at some point.” The technology that Jon Favreau and his team developed – which involves video game technology, VR sets, and a series of other inventions that could cut costs for big-budget films considerably – appears to be the same technology used for the new Disney+ Star Wars show, The Mandalorian, that Favreau is spearheading. It wouldn’t surprise me if a significant part of Lion King 2019’s budget is really R&D for The Mandalorian (and beyond). And the more cynical part of me just wonders if Lion King 2019 was the project that made the most sense to a) pay for new technology, b) test it out, and c) still make a ton of money in the process. Okay, back to our original programming!)
I had a lot of thoughts about Lion King 2019 (such as: why would a shaman-like monkey like Rafiki need scientific proof of Simba’s existence if he’s totally cool with summoning Mufasas’ spirit in the clouds? Did Favreau intentionally cut out Rafiki from the frame when Simba sees Mufasa in the clouds so that he can look at smartasses like me and say, ‘Ha! Maybe it was all in his furball head!“? If the movie’s willing to spend precious seconds and minutes of costly animated time on mouses moving around and a tuft of lion hair, couldn’t it have used some of that time and energy to transition Simba and Nala to nighttime so when they sing ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight?’ it’s actually taking place at night?), but two really stuck out to me:
The Incredibles and Super Mario. Allow me to elaborate.
For nearly a decade after The Incredibles (2004), writer/director Brad Bird was asked in every possible interview when a sequel to his Pixar classic would be coming. Every time, he had the same response: it won’t come until I have a story to tell. It took 14 years, but he finally landed on something worth telling. Even better is his insistence they maintain the same style of the original film, but slightly upgrade it. If you look at both movies side to side, the characters have the exact same caricatured look to them, only with cutting edge texture and vastly increased complexity. There are way more moving parts amongst the masterfully-directed action scenes. Their skin looks more realistic, but their faces remain as expressive as ever.
When you’re looking at a photorealistic lion, there’s not much room for emotion. And while the film does a better job towards the back end giving their animals slightly more telling facial expressions, it still feels like Planet Earth with an expensive, star-studded voice track. Now, I will be the first to admit that trying to make these 2019 lions as facially expressive as the 1994 original could be quite the source of nightmare fuel. It might look terrible. It might look fantastic. I have no idea! That’s why Disney doesn’t pay me the big bucks to shepherd these quarter-million-dollar movie theater rides.
I just wish, when this film was originally pitched as The Lion King done like The Jungle Book, someone had stopped to think about what that would do to the story. There’s only, to my recollection, a couple of scenes added (and a whole lotta sometimes delightful ad-lib from Timon and Pumbaa) and it would be overselling it to even call them scenes when they’re really just a series of shots illustrating the processing power of the new digital technology. So what you then have is a movie that is a near shot-for-shot remake of the original – meaning, that you know exactly what is going on and what’s coming ahead of you – and drained of a good 70-80% of all emotion because these animals have so little expression on their faces.
Here’s an example of how predictable this movie is: only a couple minutes into the film, my captioning device started malfunctioning. Letters disappeared and came out garbled. It was like water had been doused on it, each gasp of captioning worse than the one before it. So I took it back out of the theater, down the hall and to the lobby, switched it out, conferred with another manager, and we came back with a device that worked. And guess what? I did not miss an entire thing. Even while my device wasn’t working, I could hear and understand all the dialogue pretty clearly. Not because my hearing aid is so wonderful. But because the original, which I have not seen in years, is so seared into my brain as to be paying rent. And in the time I was gone, no new scenes or information appeared to have taken place. It’s was like watching a prohibitively expensive quote-a-long with a new coat of fancy CGI paint.
Mario and the Evolution of Complexity
Imagine The Lion King as the original Super Mario series (1, 2, 3, and Super Mario World). They were finely-tuned 2D sidescrolling classics that literally made Nintendo what it is today. In fact, people still play them all the time in a totally unironic way! They’ve held up over the years, not unlike The Lion King.
When Super Mario 64 came out in 1996, it was the first time I’d seen Mario in 3D form. Now he wasn’t limited to from going from left to right. Now he could go pretty much anywhere. He still went to all the places you were used to – the castles, underwater, way up in the sky – but he did it all with a newfound sense of freedom. The technology felt like a serious upgrade, yet remained true to the spirit of the predecessors.
From there, Nintendo adopted their Mario franchise for every iteration after (Gameboy, GameCube, Wii, WiiU, etc) and each time it upped the ante of what was possible while still remaining true to their jumping, pipe-sliding, problem-solving franchise hero. Does Lion King 2019 move the technology forward while retaining the spirit of the original? For some, the answer will be an unqualified yes. For others, like me, it’s going to be a conflicted no. It’s the same story, same shots, same songs – but I never once felt anything the entire time (other than a couple laughs at Timon and Pumbaa) – and I tear up at animated movies all the time!
But I recognize that I may be in the minority. And that Film Twitter, which had quite the time pulling apart the cultural meaning of this film at this junction in history, is still a relatively small part of the filmgoing population. Many, many people will go for nostalgia alone. Many will go because the technology looks totally bitchin’. And a great many will go simply because it’s a safe, oddly bloodless, entertaining movie for 2 hours in an air-conditioned theater in the dead middle of a hot summer. And that is all totally okay!
I just hope they can remember what they did with The Incredibles – or even look to something like Sony’s daring Into the Spiderverse – and realize they can take some risks with their storytelling. Disney is currently in the enviable position of accounting for nearly 60% of all movie ticket sales. They’re not just the king. They’re the king, queen, and chessboard. Calling them a monopoly sounds underwhelming. They’ve nearly canvassed every good weekend in the release calendar. And they’ve primed their audience for the next and the next and the next.
My only hope is that between the gross amount of success they’re accumulating and the introduction of their Disney+ streaming service, Disney will finally take the foot off the gas a little and add a few slices of invention to their safe-bet sandwich. No studio in the country is better suited to absorb the failure of a big risk, just the same as no studio in the country is better suited to offering the opportunity for a big risk.
In fact, Disney already has several very successful risks in its portfolio. It’s easy to forget, but before Marvel became the MCU, it didn’t have the rights to X-Men, Fantastic Four, or Spiderman until just recently. They were so broke they had to sell the film rights to several studios – Fox, Universal, and Sony – to stay afloat. And even then, the first Iron Man was a pretty big risk. Robert Downey, Jr. was just making a comeback. It wasn’t clear who knew Iron Man beyond comic book fans. When Iron Man made a ton of money at the box office, it still wasn’t a given that Captain America would be embraced by the public. And even when THAT movie did well, Thor was still seen as a massive risk – and, I mean, when you see what they did with Chris Hemsworth’s eyebrows in that first movie, can you blame them?
Guardians of the Galaxy? No one knew who these guys were until the first movie hit theaters with a fantastic cast and script from the brain of James Gunn and made $773 million worldwide. So what looks like unventured territory to Marvel is really pretty familiar to them. The Eternals, Shang-Chi, and a female Thor may sound like big risks. But they all are until they’re not. Pixar made its name on a series of original films, each a risk in their own way, until their first sequel with Toy Story 2. After a glut of sequels, it looks like they’re finally going back to taking risks, with two original films coming out within a year of each other (2020’s Onward and Soul)
So to say that Disney does not take risks would be unfair. But here’s hoping they stand up, take a look around in their own house at Pixar and Marvel and Lucasfilm and realize they don’t have to remake their most popular movies down to the bone. Because what makes the movie linger for many years after is not the skeleton or the skin: it’s the heart.
