“Disney people are unquestionably ingenious at double- and triple-marketing things.”Įvidently the photo-realism naysayers aren’t having an effect on that bottom line: The Lion King reboot is currently tracking at $450 million worldwide in its opening weekend. “If there’s a nickel under your refrigerator, they will find it,” he quipped. Like many other critics he also sees this new Lion King as not necessarily a creatively driven enterprise, but a means to usher a new generation into the studio’s rich archive-and to make money. Though he had not yet seen the film when we spoke, based on the concept and the trailers alone, he anticipated that it would be “a fairly stale experience” compared to the original Lion King. “The problem is, how do you make a handcrafted National Geographic character?” said urban and media historian Norman Klein, a professor at CalArts, in a separate interview. It’s extraordinary work in and of itself, the new film’s ability to render a near-perfect imitation of something from the real world. ![]() This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. Compared side by side with the original sequence, as seen in the clip below, the new film looks surprisingly joyless. Because hey, that’s what real animals would do. Instead the characters stand singing in a straight line, traveling from point A to point B. Another example: when Simba, Timon, and Pumbaa sing “Hakuna Matata” together in the new film, there’s no over-the-top expression or comedy, no jovial vine-swinging or physically impossible but enjoyably goofy wave-surfing. Instead of wicked expressions and menacing movement, his villainy is denoted by the fact that he mostly stands in shadows. But photo-realism doesn’t offer artists that same signature in the new Lion King, for example, Scar doesn’t look very different from any other lion. Andreas Deja, for example, was adept at drawing villains, creating Gaston in Beauty and the Beast, Jafar in Aladdin, and Scar in The Lion King. The pleasure of that animation, she continued, rested in each artist’s distinct hand. Furniss noted-a Disney technique dates back to the studio’s Nine Old Men, the influential core group of animators who began shaping its animation ambitions in the 1920s and 1930s. Viewers can sense that idiosyncratic artists created every character in the original film, Dr. The photo-realistic technique, critics argue, is missing the classic Disney stamp-the studio’s time-honored, individualized approach to giving each character its own distinct aesthetic. Film critic Roger Ebert called the movie Bambi for a new generation, praising its animators for embracing the studio’s classic, hand-drawn ethos while also using new technology to create “several remarkable sequences, including a stampede in which a herd seems to flow past the camera.” ![]() Maureen Furniss, an animation historian and director at CalArts, in a recent phone interview-not least because of its stunning hand-drawn animation, which brought to life vast, lush landscapes populated by a multitude of expressive animals. “It changed the dynamic of everything that was going on at the studio,” said Dr. Then it broke 200, and the parties just wouldn’t stop.” Suddenly the true box office potential of animated films had been unleashed. “I remember we had parties for when it broke $100 million,” animator Andreas Deja says in the 2005 documentary Dream on Silly Dreamer, an unvarnished look at the rise and fall of Disney animation. Released in 1994, the Shakespearean family epic became an absolute blockbuster, smashing expectations and bringing the studio to new heights it was the second-highest-grossing film in North America that year, and would soon become one of the highest-grossing films of all time domestically. After that came Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, two more critical and commercial hits that cemented Disney’s cinematic renaissance.īut none of those movies were as big as The Lion King. The studio was then just a few years removed from a prolonged artistic and box office slump, one that reversed only in 1989 with the release of The Little Mermaid. Disney was not Disney as we know it in 1994.
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