"Not Animation"

I mean, really?

John Favreau, director of Lion King 2019, on the question "Is your movie animated?"

“It depends what standard you’re using. Because there’s no real animals, and there’s no real cameras, and there’s not even any performance that’s being captured that’s underlying data that’s real. Everything is coming through the hands of artists. But to say it’s animated, I think, is misleading as far as what the expectations might be.”

I'm just now seeing this astounding quote, but come on.

When you're doing a sequence by sequence redo with photo-realistic animals created by artists replacing hand-drawn animals created by artists, and there's no live-action animals in the redo, how in God's nightgown can you call the piece a "live-action" movie?

Kind of like Walt Disney labeling Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs a live-action film because, you know, there were multiplane shots and the Prince and Snow White were rotoscoped (underlying "live action"?) and some of the water effects are pretty gosh darn realistic.

And you know, Snow White kind of upends expectations, circa 1937, about what a cartoon is.

Therefore, we'll call it "live-action".

The hell? By John Favreau's odd reasoning, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs couldn't be animation because it wasn't what audiences expected, plus, unlike Lion King 2019, there's some "live action" (i.e., rotoscope) in it.

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