Would Mickey Mouse have been popular initially if he had been a photorealistic rodent? Of course not. The reason people like him is because he’s a rounded little cartoon inkblot guy.
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I also dislike the idea of remaking old movies to “update” them. At that point, you aren’t treating films like works of art, you’re treating them like products that need to be periodically fixed or upgraded, like junky old software. To me, it’s an anti-art attitude.
I’m not trying to pick on any film specifically, and certainly not denigrating the talented artists that work on them, but there seems to be an attitude in Hollywood that cartoons need to be recreated in live-action or photorealistic CGI to be legitimized. They don’t.
You're not wrong, but I know for certain Disney is doing that to try and sell more merch without doing any work developing new stories. Like yes "Does it NEED to be animated" is still a dumb question that always gets asked but, also. Money for nothing.
In the case of all the Disney live-action "remakes", it's because they want to use the original storyboards and not compensate the people who made them. 😑
I was with you until this point. Yes, there are bad remakes that never had to be made, but reworking an older piece of art is basic to the arts, including film. I would say the question is whether the new film has anything new to add.
I'm not against a reimagining of an old story. A totally new take on Snow White, for instance, would be fine. By taking the same songs, costumes, characters from the 1937 film but modernizing it with new technology and whatever else feels like fixing the old version rather than making a new version.
I was with you up to this point. Re-imagining old films or other works of art into the modern day doesn't treat them like products - it treats them like artworks.
Art is all about building, reimagining, taking and changing.
West-Side Story is West-Side story BECAUSE of R&J, not despite it.
I didn't mean to attack all remakes there, just the attitude that classic movies "need" updates to bring the technology / cultural attitudes up to the present day. That doesn't feel like an artist with a new spin on a story so much as a company fixing an outdated product.
I push back on this part only because originality is a myth and we've been retelling stories since we've started telling stories, to me THAT is the magic of stories, they are all at their roots pretty much the same thing flavored with hand of whoever makes them, I LOVE remakes* for this reason.
I'm not against remakes in general. An artist adding their own spin to an old story is great. To me, these Disney remakes don't feel like new takes so much as 'updates,' rehashing the same lines, costumes, songs, etc. to push nostalgia buttons but 'correcting' dated elements.
Burton has been the only one that has done anything actually interesting with his attempts, but yeah other than that as a literal Disney child in so many ways there was literally never ANY "Disney Magic" to the vast majority of their 'live-action' offerings, Favreau being the primary offender imo
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budgets of a third of a billion dollars, they can't find money to pay anyone. every bean they get is fought for months by unions
Art is all about building, reimagining, taking and changing.
West-Side Story is West-Side story BECAUSE of R&J, not despite it.
The world would be hella fucking boring if we only ever told a story ONCE.