On April 15, 2016, Disney released its first live-action remake. With a budget of $175 million, Disney recast all the classic roles, re-recorded all the classic songs, and re-animated (just with computer effects) all the classic animal characters from this beloved 1967 original. The film made just short of a billion dollars.
With The Jungle Book, Disney kicked off the most unimaginative and cynically greedy filmmaking trend in the company’s long history — a trend that still persists today, with the upcoming (and truly terrible-looking) Moana remake.
In an era where remakes are incredibly common, it may seem strange to single out one particular category of them, but Disney’s live-action remakes of its animated classics are in a class of their own in terms of creative bankruptcy. From a business standpoint, I get that the reason for any remake is to capitalize on a known intellectual property. Artistically, however, remakes usually seek to deliver something different, either by updating the original movie for modern audiences, or by re-adapting the original source material, often to make a more faithful version. Some remakes are good, some are terrible, but the objective is generally to offer something new.
In contrast, the objective of the Disney live-action remakes is not to reimagine, but to repeat — to cynically trace over the original work and deliver a copy with all the same songs and major moments.
Yes, there are some updates, often to give female characters more agency (like Jasmine in Aladdin), or sidestep some racist animal characters (like the Siamese cats in The Lady and the Tramp). But these updates are not the reason the movie is being remade. They are merely a logistical necessity for releasing a film for a modern audience.
The point of these films is to deliver the same movie, so much so that people widely balk at any changes made, from altered characters to missing songs to even added songs. Disney has trained its audience to understand that any given live-action remake is the same movie as the original, and any failure to deliver on that promise is met with backlash.
The generally high box-office returns for these films obviously invite the argument that Disney is just giving the people what they want, but it’s not that simple. These films are expensive, and for every one of them we get, one less original idea is realized. Instead of making new movies and new memories for kids and families, Disney is recycling other generations’ films with varying degrees of fidelity.
Not all of the live-action remakes released since The Jungle Book are equally offensive. Mulan, for example, isn’t so much a remake of the original 1998 animated film as a re-interpretation of the Chinese folk legend Mulan is based on. That’s fine, because it’s doing its own thing.
The most offensive of the live-action remakes has got to be The Lion King. While many criticized the film’s photorealistic animals for lacking the ability to emote, it’s even more offensive to call it a live–action remake when there’s not a single live-action animal — or anything else, really — in the film. That’s not live-action, it’s just re-animated.
The fact that so many of these films are just re-animating what was already animated is what is truly most offensive about them. Disney created its entire brand around delivering animated motion pictures. By merely copying its own work, Disney is not paying respect to those classics, it’s just legally plagiarizing them.
A handful of ex-Disney employees have even said as much. When The Lion King remake came out, The Huffington Post reached out to a number of animators from the original. One of them who spoke anonymously said, “There is a huge resentment against these 3D remakes from the original 2D crews. Maybe if we got any kind of royalties it would be different.” Another animator, David Stephan, who worked on the original Lion King, said, “If you polled the crew of the original Lion King, most of them would say, ‘Why? Did you really have to do that?’ It kind of hurts.”
In 2020, Business Insider published a similar article, talking to former Disney animators about the company’s various live-action remakes. Tom Bancroft, who worked on the original Beauty and the Beast, said, “A lot of the magic was gone from that live-action version.” Tom’s brother Tony Bancroft, who worked on the original Lion King, said of its remake, “It looks like they just went back to the original storyboards and just copied what the board artists had done.”
Sergio Pablos, who worked at Disney in the late 1990s, was especially bothered by remakes of recent films, saying, “It goes against every belief I have to just remake a film that is not even that old.” A few years later, Disney announced its most egregious live-action remake yet: Moana, a beautiful animated film that’s not even a decade old, but somehow warrants a redo with Dwayne Johnson in a ridiculous wig and an even more ridiculous muscle suit.
While it seems absurd that Disney is already remaking its 3D animated movies, I’m still most bothered by the remakes of the 2D films, because Disney just isn’t making new ones anymore. Despite announcement after announcement in recent years that the studio is getting back into 2D animation, it hasn’t actually done so since 2009’s The Princess and the Frog. This is significant because this kind of animated film — the kind Disney pioneered — is already a near-dead art form. Instead of working to keep it alive, Disney is actively helping bury it with “new versions” of its classic 2D animated films.
So what should Disney do about these movies? The obvious answer is to just stop making them. While it may seem dumb for the company to leave any money on the table, Disney has done that before to preserve its artistic integrity. In the early 2000s, back when DVDs were still a big part of the market, Disney decided it was done with cheap, direct-to-video sequels to its classics that eroded the value of the company’s theatrical animated films. More recently, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige did a public mea culpa regarding the studio’s post-Avengers: Endgame output, admitting that the company prioritized quantity over quality.
I fully realize Disney is a huge conglomerate that has made money in all sorts of ridiculous ways in its history, from overpriced theme parks to countless cheap products. But Disney has always had the ability to market the hell out of its characters while also delivering highly artistic films. These remakes have eroded that special quality, and the entire Disney brand along with it. Now, a good portion of new Disney films are no more special or artistic than the latest Disney Happy Meal toy.
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