What becomes evident when you look at the new animated version of the old animated version of Lion King, is ... the punch and vividness are gone. The hand-drawn characters made the original sing. They did cartoony things in a bright, hand-crafted environment. What you've got with the new iteration is a weird kind of Disney True-life Adventure, except these are photo-realistic animal creations instead of actual creatures. They do photo-realistic type things, but also talk ... and here and their burst into Elton John tunes.
But "True-Life Adventure" isn't quite right either.
Because what flashed through my mind as I watched the song up above is how the African beasts of the new opus resemble animals from a Disney flick from 1957 entitled Perri, a saga about a flying squirrel that Walt & Co. labelled a True-Life "fantasy" sixty-two years ago. Unlike earlier Disney True-Life Adventure documentaries, Perri was pretty much made up, with animals doing things the filmmakers wanted them to do for a scripted plot, not things hidden camera operators photographed them doing in their random, day-to day existences. There were, in fact, over a dozen different flying squirrels portraying the title character.
So, my opinion? You'll be better off thinking of Perri as a close cousin to The Lion King 2019. And the hand-drawn Lion King as a more distant relation.
No comments:
Post a Comment