I said before, in my long comparison Aladdin review, that Aladdin was the first Disney movie where I watched both the original and the live-action remake. I also stated, in that same Aladdin review, that after seeing them both I was never going to go watch a Disney live-action remake again. You may wonder why not. Was I that upset by a single bad remake that I never wanted to give any of the others a chance? Had I not liked any of the others, and if I had liked them, why stop watching them? What did I think of all the live-action remakes I'd seen up till then, anyway?
Your questions will be answered here.
At first I had been watching most of the Disney live-action remakes as they came out, and for the most part I liked them. But my first experience with watching a live-action version of a fairy tale adapted by Disney was Mirror Mirror, which I didn't realize until later wasn't actually a Disney movie. In any case,it's so different from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves that you could hardly qualify it as the same story, more like a twist on the Grimms' fairy tale which Disney had adapted more literally in 1937. But I still pinpoint that as the first time I watched a live-action version of a fairy tale also adapted by Disney, and I remember enjoying it.
The first actual Disney live-action remake I saw (which was still a twist on their previous story rather than an actual remake) was Maleficent, and while I hadn't seen Sleeping Beauty to compare the two, I didn't really like this one. I was expecting a story explaining how Maleficent became the kind of person who would try to kill a child because she wasn't invited to her christening and then tell Sleeping Beauty through Maleficent's eyes, not one that would turn Maleficent completely blameless and then change the ending. I didn't care for the story they wrote instead, and felt they did Prince Philip dirty, not to mention acting like his relationship with Aurora was meaningless instead of trying to add more depth and chemistry, which they would certainly have been capable of. I did like what they did with Aurora in that movie, though.
I can say nothing on the live-action Jungle Book because I refused to watch it in protest of the exclusion of the Beatle Vultures, which were my favourite part of the original movie. I suspect the sixties vibe was gone entirely from the live-action, made as it was in the 2010s. The live-action Cinderella I liked a lot, and Beauty and the Beast is hands-down my favourite of the live-action offerings. I must clarify that I had not seen the original of either film at the time, and don't know what I would have thought if I had been familiar with them, but I can say they both worked beautifully as stand-alones. (After having watched the original Beauty and the Beast, I can safely tell you that the emotional impact of both versions is the same: mascara running all down my face by the end of it.) You can see a pattern emerging here: when I did enjoy the live-action, I had never seen the original movie, and when I had seen the original movie, I had no interest in watching the live-action. An interesting observation considering these remakes should really be aimed at the same people who loved the originals before... but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I didn't watch the live-action Dumbo because I thought the trailers looked boring, all just a bunch of circus performances, and knowing nothing about the original story there was nothing there to influence me either way. I was more interested in the princess movies anyway.
And then came Aladdin.
I didn't go into this when I wrote my review of the two movies because I was mostly focusing on my impressions of the movies themselves, but the vibe I got from the first live-action Aladdin trailer I watched was very different from everything I knew about the original movie, and felt significantly less fun. I'd been curious about the movie for a while anyway, and that was what prompted me to, for the first time ever, watch the original animated movie before going to see the live-action remake. And then of course, I completely fell in love with the original movie (the real movie, if you will), and then, well, there was no way the remake was going to live up, but I did hope it would at least still be good... It wasn't.
So when the live-action Lion King came out just a couple months later, I was on the fence for a long while. It was possible the movie would be good, and I could go see it in the theatres and have a fun time, but I had not recovered from my experience with live-action Aladdin and wasn't ready to trust another remake so soon. When I made my final decision not to watch the movie, my reasoning was this: if the remake is bad, I'd have wasted my time. And even if it's good – I already have a good Lion King movie, the original animated one from 1994, which I had seen by that point and which I loved. I don't need another Lion King, no matter how well-done it was. It's not worth going in hopes of getting another Beauty and the Beast, and risk getting another Aladdin. It's especially not worth it when you can just go watch the originals, which have been consistently good in a way the remakes just – aren't.
But that shouldn't be the case, should it? Disney is the company making these remakes, it's not like it's some rival company wanting to prove that they can adapt the same fairy tales but do it better. The remakes should be geared towards the biggest fans of the original Disney movies, like I said in my Aladdin review; they should be accompaniments meant to show us how these stories would have looked in real life, to remind us of the magic. That was why Beauty and the Beast worked so well for me, I think – after I did watch the original movie, I could see how closely the remake followed the plot structure and the message of the original, and while it did add in a few inevitable “modern edits” like those tweaks to make sure no one would mistake Belle for being weak or having Stockholm Syndrome, taking out Gaston's chauvinism, reworking the line “Bonjour, good day, how is your wife?” so there was no married man admiring a buxom woman, and of course, Belle's requisite live-action-Disney-princess obsession with her mother, none of that was intrusive enough to distract from the story. More importantly, both movies had me crying at the happy ending, enchanted by the music, rooting for Belle and the Beast, and wishing painful deaths upon Gaston. The emotional impact never changed. If you've read my Aladdin review (you might as well by this point; I will link it here), you already know all the many reasons why that remake left me with none of the same emotional impact as the original and how they completely messed up the plot structure and the message, so I won't go into any of that now. But why would you do that to your own movie when you expect your most loyal fans to be the ones coming to see these? Why does one remake follow the story so faithfully while the next one rips it to shreds?
I don't have the answer. But I hear things: Theories that the live-action Aladdin remake made so many of its ill-chosen changes to “clean it up” or make it more “appropriate” and “modern” somehow. Rumours of drastic changes in the upcoming Mulan remake like the removal of Mushu. Theories of how difficult it might be to animate all the Little Mermaid underwater scenes in CGI, or how they could manage a realistic talking crab, and what changes might be made to the story due to that. There are patterns in the remakes I've already seen, even in the ones I liked – subtle tweaks made to the princesses to give them a more “modern” version of female strength (has anyone else noticed how every live-action Disney princess seems to be obsessed with her late mother??) I also hear the remakes discussed way too often as if they were the official movies, without any indication that this was merely a redo of another movie by the same company. (When I looked up The Lion King's release date to make sure I had it right for this review, the very first search result said “2019” and I had to specify “animated” in the keywords before Google knew I wanted the original one. And don't get me started on the “Aladdin” content suggested to me on my social media feeds....) I see and I hear these things, and I wonder – are these remakes really being made so that fans of the original movies can experience what their favourite characters and settings would look like in real life and recapture the magic? Or are they being made to “fix” the originals, to take out any elements that people might have complained about in the past, to replace the originals with more appropriately modern versions?
Besides, even if all the remakes were being made with pure motivations, the sheer volume of them is getting a little ridiculous. I mean, to make a (faithful) live-action version of one of your classic stories every couple of years or so would be fine. But to come out with so many that they take all attention away from creating something new? I don't think Disney has released an original movie since 2016, not including that one offering from Pixar, and that's a good indication that it might be time to step away from the remakes for a while.
So there you have it. I don't want to support a project with that kind of motivation behind it. I don't want to be an enabler who encourages more remakes and less originality. I mean, the sooner Disney stops focusing on remaking all their old stories, the sooner they can give us something new again, right? And, yes, I certainly don't want to support any future remakes of live-action Aladdin quality. One of those was quite enough!
Comments