2010 was a big year in the sphere of popular culture. One Direction came third place on the X Factor, Lady Gaga had melomaniacs and vegans alike gasping at her fleshy frock at the VMA’s (both in horror and avant-garde intrigue), and Disney had their first soaring success with a live-action remake. Tim Burton’s gothic-toned Alice in Wonderland became only the sixth film in history to gross over one billion dollars at the time of its release. With its darker, more mature stylisation of characters, its eccentric environmental visuals, and an action-packed story propelled by two stellar female characters, the reimagining of this 1951 film evidently struck gold with a 21st-century audience.
It wasn’t Disney’s first live-action effort. That honour goes to 1994’s The Jungle Book (and yes, they rehashed it in 2016) They also, somewhat randomly, released a pair of 101 Dalmatians films with Glenn Close (and yes, they made a ‘Cruella’ spin-off in 2021.) However, Disney didn’t start digging deeper into the mine until the turn of the ‘10’s‘tens. Since then, Disney has released fourteen live-action off-spring as of August 2022, and the gold rush isn’t slowing anytime soon with a whopping nineteen titles floating somewhere down Disney’s production pipeline.
And why would they stop? Four of their remakes have crossed the billion dollar box office mark, two of which, Aladdin and The Lion King, both came out in 2019. Not even two months apart. That is virtually unheard of during the notoriously competitive summer box office season. Clearly, there is such a hankering appetite for these films that Disney has conjured up a whole new kitchen dedicated to stewing and serving out these live-action feasts. It’s a dream deal really. Disney can keep re-releasing the same tried and tested stories and children’s parents get to bask in the comfort of films they loved as a youth with a seemingly more mature and realistic spin that keeps them interested. There seems to be only one problem with this contemporary phenomenon that I, along with a pen-wielding angry mob of animators and film critics, can’t seem to get over.
A lot of these live-action films are just not good. At all.
Rather than a feast, they are more like a tepid buffet. Trays of sloppy mush of no real substance that just make you achingly long for your usual, favourite restaurant and their classic carbonara instead.
There are some exceptions of course. The quiet, well-mannered students who unfortunately still suffer the punishments of an otherwise unruly class. Christopher Robin is a honey-sweet film about the pains of growing up and rediscovering your inner child. It’s pleasantly sappy and simple. I liked the first Maleficent film. The Wicked-esque approach to rethinking the wrongdoer’s origins was intriguing and added a lot of depth to one of Disney’s least fleshed-out villains.
However, this is exactly the element where the majority of the live action remakes fall down. The reimagined characters are stretched out so thinly over a torture rack of painful new plotlines, very obvious political shoe-horning, and cheap self-referencing that they are left spent and souless compared to their animated counterparts. That is not to say that those films are without their flaws, but they are superior to the flimsy sheets of characters left behind in the torn up pages of the original stories. For the purposes of exploring this conundrum I’ll be focusing on Mulan (2020) and The Lion King (2019) so spoiler alert for those who have managed to avoid them.
We’ll start with, in my opinion, the worst Disney remake of them all. 2020’s reign truly was merciless. I was willing to give Mulan a chance even after discovering they were cutting all of the songs and mushu for a seemingly more mature and grittier remake that would revitalise the beloved story for modern cinema goers. Instead of songs, we were promised by producer James Reed the “whole breath” of the Mulan character as represented in ancient Chinese culture. He said in an interview with Collider that removing the songs made room for this to be explored. In a cultural climate that is always striving for more representation and diversity, this could have created great enrichment for the character and story.
Except this does not happen. The catastrophic changes to Mulan’s character don’t enrich the film at all. In fact they somehow manage to butcher one of Disney’s most likeable and charismatic princesses along with her message. Mulan in the animated film is admirable as a great protagonist because she is a relatable, ordinary girl who goes against the odds of a gruelling patriarchal society and uses her resilience, intelligence and unique femininity to overcome her obstacles in the army.
In the live action film however, Mulan is born with powerful ‘Qi’, a force that grants her supernatural abilities reserved only for warriors, though she is imposed to quell it under societal expectations placed on her to be married. There are so many things wrong here. First and foremost, it’s not even culturally accurate. ‘Qi’ in Chinese culture is described as being the life-force of any living entity, not a Captain America strength serum that women can’t possess. It completely nullifies the empowering stance of the original film by bastardising a cultural philosophy and weaponizing it to create a weak feminist rhetoric that undermines its own message. This sentiment was put best by Christina Pan who writes, “Now instead of having Mulan fight alongside men and prove that women are equally as competent as men, the message is that only the few women who are “chosen” are capable.”
Besides all of, well, that, the film is drained of any fun. In removing songs, the animation medium, the entertaining side-kick, there’s an empty, gaping void left behind that isn’t filled. Removing fun doesn’t add grit like these live actions crave. Instead, it creates a blackhole that further sucks life from these remakes. I would argue that the original Mulan has far more nuanced grit and more exciting action sequences than the live-action ever dares to achieve with its flashy sets and awkwardly bad homage sequences to better martial arts movies, and its animated predecessor.
The Lion King also suffers from this desired element of realism that seems to entrance the popular audience. In Disney’s mission to push its CGI to the limits and dazzle us with feats of visual technology, the film loses all of its original spunk and persona. A prime example of this is the watered down version of Scar’s ‘“Be Prepared.” The song was shortened and spliced to make room for a Beyoncé contemporary gospel track that adds nothing to the story or the character as it plays over a montage of Simba running through photo-realisticphotorealistic landscape backgrounds. Now, Scar’s iconic scene becomes a pretty realistic looking lion wandering around some fabricated rocks. That could describe the energy of the entirety of this film. Considering I’ve watched national geographic documentaries where the animals displayed more expression of emotion, one thing this film did not need was a diluted version of its delightfully wicked villain. Disney seems to be putting everything and anything over the value of it’s source materials, whether that be performative acts of undermining feminism, cultural brutalisation or technological exploration.
There is also a notable coincidence in the films that Disney has been remaking. Three out of the four billion dollar remakes are from the ‘Disney Renaissance’ period that ran from 1989-1999. They are clearly marketed towards the millennial demographic, who grew up closely with the originals (and Beyoncé for that matter) and now have children of their own. If anything, one of the few points that these live-action remakes do prove is that childhood nostalgia is powerful, and many viewers are unknowingly looking through rose-coloured spectacles when watching these less than spectacular films that remind them of simpler times.
If these original films are from the Disney Renaissance, then we are deep in that strange period around the mid 1800’s when the stark photorealism of the camera was all the rage and artists were struggling to reinvent their creative purpose in a modern world. After this, however, there was light at the end of the tunnel with the glow of the impressionists and their use of soul-stirring colour and light. With that in mind, we can only pray that Disney takes on a similar trajectory in the future with more vibrant, and I dare say original, storytelling.
