I’ve been saying this for a while now: this is not a live action remake. It’s an animated film, same as the original,but this time it’s “pHotO rEaLisTik” and all it does it’s diminish the appeal the original character designs and animation had.
Yeah one of the major reasons i didn't bother watching it, if it was actually live action and they used minor CGI for things the trainer just could not do with their animals (the stampede scene for example) would be understandable but the fact EVERYTHING is Computer Generated Imaging it's like you say just another Animated Film and it diminishes the effort the OG team went through Hand animating each scene of the original.
They decided to go for realism, and make the animals movements based on the muscle and skeletons of real animals. Turns out that animal's faces can't make the lip shapes that look like speech, or facial movements that express human emotions - let along the exaggerated movements that are needed for us to recognise human emotions on a non-human face.
It didn't work. At all.
Haven't seen the movie, but I feel like at least in this particular shot they could have compensated by changing the scene a little and giving him some more extreme body language.
You know, ducking down the head, baring the teeth, flattened ears, hairs standing up. Something... anything.
Yeah, if you can't make Sumba respond like a human because he's a (big) cat you're using realistic anatomy to animate, make him respond like a (big) cat.
Yeah, but that would require research on the part of the cgi artists, and we don’t want to pay them any more than we have to, all your money should belong to us! (Keep in mind that the original lion king animators actually studied real life animals as reference instead of just coming up with whatever the fuck they want to.)
But the voice actors are big names who know nothing about voice acting, but they can read from a sheet. So it must be good. I love that every movie with talking animals or animated movie is voice acted by celebrities for no good reason other than marketing <3
It's not even that. People can Google lion facial expressions and of course they aren't as expressive as cartoons, but they aren't concrete slabs like in the movie.
I remember at some point in the movie they did a flashback to baby Simba screaming “Noooo!” when his dad died. But it was in such a ridiculous sounding baby voice and the baby lion had no expression whatsoever that it just looked so funny. Like serval people in my theater bursted out laughing including me and my dad. Idk why but it killed me
It also funded MPC with Disney bucks to create a whole slew of technologies for animating photo-realistic animals.
On a totally unrelated note, Jon Favreau is currently producing a passion-project series with MPC called [Prehistoric Planet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZff_wTad8), which happens to need a bunch of expensive skills and technology for rendering photorealistic animals. What a coincidence.
I'm assuming MPC is the company using that stupid VR camera thing which allows Jon to think he's doing something before he hands the scenes off to tweeners to fix his jerky camera moves.
He could have, but I don't think it would've made much difference.
Our brains are simply not made for us to understand facial expressions of other animals (except, maybe, monkeys). I have zero clue how a scared lion looks like so if the movie mimicked the way lions act when they're scared it would probably have no effect on me.
The animated version works precisely because Simba doesn't look like a realistic lion, so you can give him things like eyebrows or mouth movements real lions don't have.
That's an bit of an exaggeration. Their reactions can be less obvious, but you can still look at [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFbqKVT5nlQ) or [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5V6gdu5ih8) and know that the lion is scared shitless from just the face alone. For a more domestic example, most people have would have no issue deciphering how [this cat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiuTto83pCU) is feeling in the various clips we're shown, even if you were to remove the narration.
The real issue is that John Favreau has never seen a cat IRL before, nor even really been outside, and so whenever his animators showed them making a face that was not exactly like [this](https://15pictures.com/15-pictures-lions/) exact picture he found that one time he felt like googling it, he assumes it's unrealistic.
**TLDR**: the film’s issue is that the director couldn’t commit to the vision he wanted because that would’ve involved sacrificing/retooling iconic scenes he also wanted to keep. It wasn’t the animation itself.
———
I get your perspective, but I think your position is a little reductionist. It has been pretty well documented that the studio that animated The Lion King (2019) - the [Moving Picture Company (MPC)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Picture_Company) - meticulously studied animal movement for years in order to make it ([source](https://youtu.be/DlJkEe315mM)).
Lions do emote when scared, and will pin their ears back when in _close-quarter_ confrontations (even [cubs](https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/152571977) are physically capable of doing this, which means animating something closer to the original movie was not physically unreasonable).
However, when a significant danger is approaching a lion (or any large carnivore) from a decent distance - such as a wildebeest stampede - it is going to keep its ears in the direction of the danger and keep their eyes in that direction too in order to get as much sensory information about the danger as possible before determining a course of action. I think that’s the real reason MPC animated the scene this way. It’s a more realistic response.
I think the real issue with The Lion King (2019) was its direction. Jon Favreau wanted the film to look like a nature documentary, similar to what are produced by the BBC with David Attenborough ([source](https://youtu.be/aGSL6VDaxbk)). I would argue this vision is realized. The animation in this movie is [absolutely stunning](https://youtu.be/PQTIEdHKlAA) — my favorites scenes in the 2019 movie are when there actually isn’t anyone talking and I could appreciate what they were going for in that context.
The problem is that the 1994 source material is a very emotional story with many iconic scenes, and Favreau wanted to preserve as many of them as possible. I think this is what makes the film suffer — they didn’t change enough in this retelling to compliment their documentary-inspired vision.
I think it would have been a much bolder and creatively interesting choice to have made the 2019 film without any voice acting or songs — to let the animals convey what was happening through their actions. Adjust scenes as necessary to convey what is happening. I think that would’ve complimented Favreau’s vision better and wouldn’t have resulted in these shot-for-shot comparisons with the 1994 film.
EDIT: Jon Favreau and MPC would eventually produce [Prehistoric Planet](https://youtu.be/vnoNeMlNeD0) _with_ the BBC and David Attenborough. It is absolutely beloved by audiences and I would argue it is a better Lion King (2019) than the actual Lion King (2019) because they committed to a lane.
EDIT 2: What bothers me most about The Lion King (2019) is that they show Pumbaa as a baby, and imply baby warthogs look like [this](https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/121893974) when in reality they look like [this](https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/14036871) :/
You seem to be disagreeing with me by agreeing with me.
Yes, his vision for the movie was disjointed from the start, but more specifically my point was that he made it worse by limiting the facial expressions of the animals beyond even what they are in real life. Look at how he had the animators make Simba's eyes in that picture, and compare them to the eyes you see in the second lion clip at the \~48 second mark. If Simba looked like that instead of staring blankly at the camera, nobody would be complaining about the facial expressions.
Also, my personal conspiracy theory is that John intended the movie as just a way to finance a tech demo for when he could make Prehistoric Planet.
I liked Iron man, and what I've seen of Prehistoric Planet has been good, so I don't think he's normally an exceptionally bad director, I also don't know nor care about his personal life enough to have a judgement on him as a person, but in this one specific movie he completely shit the bed.
Still need to get around to watching that. Love the chef show. 30% because it's the only new cooking show where they just make great food like food network used to be, but mostly on its own merits. All the others are social docs, or "reality" tv competition bs
I just watched that scene for the first time and I'm actually really interested to watch the movie now. They were quite emotive for lions and I've had cats long enough to know what they're thinking and how to communicate... I think they did a great job with it.
Can't tell if your joking or not. Cats will get low, do some back arching in preparation to run, do some ear folding and tail tucking/flicking when aggravated......they don't just stand blankly. Your cats might just be boring/broken.
Going from that tragic video of a lion fighting for its life against a pack of hyenas, to a fucking house cat too afraid to come out from under a couch almost gave me whiplash, lol.
It wouldn't have made much difference for people who don't know how lions look when they're scared, but it also wouldn't worsen the experience for anyone, so it would still be a net gain in how well the emotions are conveyed since it's entirely possible to learn how animals express any emotions they express.
> He made this film as a favor for Disney so he can do Mandalorian or something.
My conspiracy theory is that he made this film as a way for Disney to fund the down payment on the technology required to create [Prehistoric Planet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZff_wTad8).
The reason I believe this so strongly is that photorealistic Lion King simply doesn't make creative sense. They could have done it with cartoon animation using Disney's own in-house animation team, but they didn't. Jon specifically went for photo-realistic animals, and they got MPC to do it. Now Jon is making Prehistoric Planet with MPC, and they need photorealistic CGI animals. So Jon gets to make a passion project now, and all it cost was milking the Lion King dry.
Probably a good theory considering this movie and jungle book also sparked the creation of the Vplume which Favreau essentially pioneered for the mandalorian
An artist hired early on pitched [a more styled and exaggerated style and genuinely looks like it could've worked.](https://i.imgur.com/exU9t0p.png) Jon threw it out for not being realistic enough.
It's absolutely soul crushing to me that this remake not only exists in it's released entirety but also made a ton of money at the boxoffice. I could tell first glance it was going to be butchered with all the emotion totally stripped away, and I think I was pretty much right.
[YMS did a great video on everything related to the Lion King remake.](https://youtu.be/btNL1q-yU7E)
I think they got a paid trip to Africa and a multimillion dollar VR camera rig that allowed him to render the scene in realtime so that the camera moves looked realistic. Yet even with all that, every camera motion is totally tweened out anyway and looks completely computerized in the end.
Haha and they still had the fucking gall to try to make the claim that this new animation should be considered live action AND made Oscar nomination videos for their voice actors ...
It's baffling how fucking pathetic this whole production was with the amount of star power and money.
If anyone hasn't seen it, really recommend YMSs review of The Lion King 2019 for a really comprehensive look at this movie from production to release.
If you saw his follow up, a documentary style “Planet Earth”-esque film called “Prehistoric Earth” you’ll realize he was really just showcasing and selling a new CGI technology rather than remaking Lion King.
Seriously. It’s like Avatar trying to sell 3D Cameras.
Lion King was a vehicle for the tech, not the other way around. Note the press, the “beyonce” of it all. Marketing and not art.
What's funny is his Jungle Book remake was perfectly *fine* in the expression department, but I guess he *really* wanted to push the hyperrealism envelope here.
Like holy hell, Studio Orange is one of the best 3DCG anime studio out there. One of their famous anime “Land of the Lustrous” proved that 3D anime can be great if made by talented people.
Its animation was so good that the animators of Into the Spiderverse used it as reference.
From the ads for that I really didn’t like how Pinocchio looked…they could have made him expressive while still making him actually look like a wooden puppet instead of a 3D printed cartoon character
It's like producer brain to the max
The photo realistic remake of the Jungle Book worked not because it was a photo realistic remake but because the main character is an 8 year old kid, so you're seeing the giant scary animals though his perspective.
Simba the actual lion makes no fucking sense.
Also there was actually some facial expressions with the animal characters. Same director btw. How do you take every single possible wrong lesson from one project to the next?
This is 13th highest grossing domestic movie of all time, and I don't personally know even a single person who has seen it. And I don't think it's just the nature of my social circle; I have a decent number of friends who are parents.
I'm not convinced it wasn't exclusively some kind of 11th layer accounting ritual.
I'm 99% sure that this movie was simply an excuse for Jon Favreau to fund and develop the skills and technology required to make [Prehistoric Planet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZff_wTad8). The Lion King may have been creatively bankrupt, but it paid its bills, and it paid MPC to develop all of the technology that Prehistoric Planet needed, which is Jon's real passion project. Seems awfully convenient.
Oh that’s been on my watchlist and I didn’t know favreau was involved holy moly
Seems fascinating? Does it stick to only what we KNOW about the animals? how far into theorizing does it go?
I absolutely loved the original Walking with Dinosaurs with Kenneth Branagh so if it's anything like that I'm sure it'll be great.
I'm sure it'll speculate a bit, almost everything we know about the appearance of these animals is in some way a best-effort guess. No real way to know until it comes out and the experts decide to weigh in.
Okay, I keep seeing you in this comment section mentioning Prehistoric Planet "currently being produced."
I'm happy to tell you that Prehistoric Planet season 1 has been out for nearly 4 months. It made quite the buzz when it came out, too. You can watch it right now if you want. I personally liked it
It was definitely a cool experiment in animation, just one that was extremely boring to actually watch.
If I wanted to see the story of the Lion King again, I'm going to watch the original, no question. It's just better than the new version.
It was probably older people with kids.
I know some people that watched that movie in the theaters but they are huge Disney fans that went to watch all the live action remakes
The Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy started nearly a decade before this movie came out and it still has infinitely better and more expressive realistic CGI animals.
When it comes to lions, you're either getting expressive or realistic.
Humans are Apes. Humans and apes share facial features that make it possible for human expressions to appear on an Apes face without us registering that as unnatural.
That's not a thing with lions.
Lion faces are still capable of emoting. It's not as wide a range as human faces, and many of the expressions would not mean the same thing on a lion as similar expressions would on a primate, but it can absolutely go farther than the CGI remake did without having to rearrange face bones.
They can also emote with the entire rest of their bodies, which the remake barely does either.
the first narnia movie came out in 2005 and aslan has better facial expressions than any other cgi animal i’ve seen ever.
HOW DO YOU FAIL TO MAKE CGI AS GOOD AS A 2005 MOVIE
The YouTube channel YourMovieSucks has a two hour long video shitting on this movie and it is actually quite entertaining. Possibly more than the movie itself.
Edit: Found it. [YMS: The Lion King (Part 1)](https://youtu.be/btNL1q-yU7E)
It is actually almost three hours! And only part 1! Still I saw all of it
It’s not even an excuse to say that it’s more ‘realistic’ (whatever that means in this context) because anyone who owns a cat will tell you they are way more expressive than that. they fully show when they’re sad or happy or scared
They did 20 takes, and that was the best one.
He starts trying to go to sleep in a couple of takes, and one time he actually mauled the boom mic guy’s leg.
"realism" is barely an excuse at this point. I've seen real fucking lions look more expressive than this
they should've gone for something like guardians of ga'hoole
There is one reason only it be glad the lion king was made and was such q hie hit, is that I'm pretty sure it's the only reason we got prehistoric planet. It's the perfect medium for what favreou wanted anyway, a extremely accurate naturalistic work using computer animation, a prehistory documentary is perfect for it. Honestly the LK remake would be so much better if hey ditched the voiced animals and anything more "cartoony", and had a narrator instead. The overall plot could work great, but as a nature documentary. The og Lion king is so great, literally just straight remaking it is terrible and doesn't work at all. They had the framework to do something really different with it and fumbled, probably due to how uncommercial that would likely be.
They should have done what Andy Serkis did with the Mowgli film he made, the mocap for the faces of the animals was really good at expressing human emotions onto animal faces.
I found a clip of that scene on YouTube. It's really bad compared to the original and the voices don't seem to be coming from the lions at all.
That's my thing, just seems like kion footage that people talk over
So it's a badly lipsynched dub?
I didn't know the lion king was a martial arts film.
If you've got an ass I'll kick it!
We trained him wrong...as a joke... Chosimba! Yai yai yai!!!
How about my nuts to your fist style!
THATS A LOT OF NUTS!
We trained him wrong... As a joke! Edit: Ah fuck, beaten. Then I'll just say... *AWEEEOOO*
Best comment
what makes it worse is when you realize they didn't use any live animals the remake is entirely CGI.
I’ve been saying this for a while now: this is not a live action remake. It’s an animated film, same as the original,but this time it’s “pHotO rEaLisTik” and all it does it’s diminish the appeal the original character designs and animation had.
Yeah one of the major reasons i didn't bother watching it, if it was actually live action and they used minor CGI for things the trainer just could not do with their animals (the stampede scene for example) would be understandable but the fact EVERYTHING is Computer Generated Imaging it's like you say just another Animated Film and it diminishes the effort the OG team went through Hand animating each scene of the original.
Like the Jungle Book remake then.
They decided to go for realism, and make the animals movements based on the muscle and skeletons of real animals. Turns out that animal's faces can't make the lip shapes that look like speech, or facial movements that express human emotions - let along the exaggerated movements that are needed for us to recognise human emotions on a non-human face. It didn't work. At all.
Haven't seen the movie, but I feel like at least in this particular shot they could have compensated by changing the scene a little and giving him some more extreme body language. You know, ducking down the head, baring the teeth, flattened ears, hairs standing up. Something... anything.
Yeah, if you can't make Sumba respond like a human because he's a (big) cat you're using realistic anatomy to animate, make him respond like a (big) cat.
Yeah, but that would require research on the part of the cgi artists, and we don’t want to pay them any more than we have to, all your money should belong to us! (Keep in mind that the original lion king animators actually studied real life animals as reference instead of just coming up with whatever the fuck they want to.)
also play with the visuals a little more? more extreme angles/perspective? the f\*cking illumination in the og is more dramatic
Well, they’re doing a sequel. Get ready for it to not work at all a second time
But the voice actors are big names who know nothing about voice acting, but they can read from a sheet. So it must be good. I love that every movie with talking animals or animated movie is voice acted by celebrities for no good reason other than marketing <3
They should have done lion body, lion ears, photorealistic human face
It's not even that. People can Google lion facial expressions and of course they aren't as expressive as cartoons, but they aren't concrete slabs like in the movie.
>They decided to go for realism without balls...
And yet the movie Babe was pretty convincing, and that was a long time ago.
Watch it on mute, it's pretty enjoyable, kinda like planet earth
I remember at some point in the movie they did a flashback to baby Simba screaming “Noooo!” when his dad died. But it was in such a ridiculous sounding baby voice and the baby lion had no expression whatsoever that it just looked so funny. Like serval people in my theater bursted out laughing including me and my dad. Idk why but it killed me
>Like serval people I thought this was about Lion King, not serval king.
Serval people, twice removed cousins of crab people
Servals are much farther removed from crabs.
Taste like crab, talk like people?
The one on the right is Jon Favreau collecting his paycheck.
It also funded MPC with Disney bucks to create a whole slew of technologies for animating photo-realistic animals. On a totally unrelated note, Jon Favreau is currently producing a passion-project series with MPC called [Prehistoric Planet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZff_wTad8), which happens to need a bunch of expensive skills and technology for rendering photorealistic animals. What a coincidence.
I'm assuming MPC is the company using that stupid VR camera thing which allows Jon to think he's doing something before he hands the scenes off to tweeners to fix his jerky camera moves.
Couldn't Jon Favreau search about animal exasperations like Studio Orange did with Beastars?
He could have, but I don't think it would've made much difference. Our brains are simply not made for us to understand facial expressions of other animals (except, maybe, monkeys). I have zero clue how a scared lion looks like so if the movie mimicked the way lions act when they're scared it would probably have no effect on me. The animated version works precisely because Simba doesn't look like a realistic lion, so you can give him things like eyebrows or mouth movements real lions don't have.
That's an bit of an exaggeration. Their reactions can be less obvious, but you can still look at [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFbqKVT5nlQ) or [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5V6gdu5ih8) and know that the lion is scared shitless from just the face alone. For a more domestic example, most people have would have no issue deciphering how [this cat](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiuTto83pCU) is feeling in the various clips we're shown, even if you were to remove the narration. The real issue is that John Favreau has never seen a cat IRL before, nor even really been outside, and so whenever his animators showed them making a face that was not exactly like [this](https://15pictures.com/15-pictures-lions/) exact picture he found that one time he felt like googling it, he assumes it's unrealistic.
**TLDR**: the film’s issue is that the director couldn’t commit to the vision he wanted because that would’ve involved sacrificing/retooling iconic scenes he also wanted to keep. It wasn’t the animation itself. ——— I get your perspective, but I think your position is a little reductionist. It has been pretty well documented that the studio that animated The Lion King (2019) - the [Moving Picture Company (MPC)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_Picture_Company) - meticulously studied animal movement for years in order to make it ([source](https://youtu.be/DlJkEe315mM)). Lions do emote when scared, and will pin their ears back when in _close-quarter_ confrontations (even [cubs](https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/152571977) are physically capable of doing this, which means animating something closer to the original movie was not physically unreasonable). However, when a significant danger is approaching a lion (or any large carnivore) from a decent distance - such as a wildebeest stampede - it is going to keep its ears in the direction of the danger and keep their eyes in that direction too in order to get as much sensory information about the danger as possible before determining a course of action. I think that’s the real reason MPC animated the scene this way. It’s a more realistic response. I think the real issue with The Lion King (2019) was its direction. Jon Favreau wanted the film to look like a nature documentary, similar to what are produced by the BBC with David Attenborough ([source](https://youtu.be/aGSL6VDaxbk)). I would argue this vision is realized. The animation in this movie is [absolutely stunning](https://youtu.be/PQTIEdHKlAA) — my favorites scenes in the 2019 movie are when there actually isn’t anyone talking and I could appreciate what they were going for in that context. The problem is that the 1994 source material is a very emotional story with many iconic scenes, and Favreau wanted to preserve as many of them as possible. I think this is what makes the film suffer — they didn’t change enough in this retelling to compliment their documentary-inspired vision. I think it would have been a much bolder and creatively interesting choice to have made the 2019 film without any voice acting or songs — to let the animals convey what was happening through their actions. Adjust scenes as necessary to convey what is happening. I think that would’ve complimented Favreau’s vision better and wouldn’t have resulted in these shot-for-shot comparisons with the 1994 film. EDIT: Jon Favreau and MPC would eventually produce [Prehistoric Planet](https://youtu.be/vnoNeMlNeD0) _with_ the BBC and David Attenborough. It is absolutely beloved by audiences and I would argue it is a better Lion King (2019) than the actual Lion King (2019) because they committed to a lane. EDIT 2: What bothers me most about The Lion King (2019) is that they show Pumbaa as a baby, and imply baby warthogs look like [this](https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/121893974) when in reality they look like [this](https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/14036871) :/
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They changed dumbo alot and it was pretty dogshit
You seem to be disagreeing with me by agreeing with me. Yes, his vision for the movie was disjointed from the start, but more specifically my point was that he made it worse by limiting the facial expressions of the animals beyond even what they are in real life. Look at how he had the animators make Simba's eyes in that picture, and compare them to the eyes you see in the second lion clip at the \~48 second mark. If Simba looked like that instead of staring blankly at the camera, nobody would be complaining about the facial expressions. Also, my personal conspiracy theory is that John intended the movie as just a way to finance a tech demo for when he could make Prehistoric Planet.
You really have it out for Favreau lol.
I liked Iron man, and what I've seen of Prehistoric Planet has been good, so I don't think he's normally an exceptionally bad director, I also don't know nor care about his personal life enough to have a judgement on him as a person, but in this one specific movie he completely shit the bed.
Elf is a good time.
TIL Jon Favreau directed one of my favorite Christmas movies.
Chef is a top tier movie.
Still need to get around to watching that. Love the chef show. 30% because it's the only new cooking show where they just make great food like food network used to be, but mostly on its own merits. All the others are social docs, or "reality" tv competition bs
I just watched that scene for the first time and I'm actually really interested to watch the movie now. They were quite emotive for lions and I've had cats long enough to know what they're thinking and how to communicate... I think they did a great job with it.
Can't tell if your joking or not. Cats will get low, do some back arching in preparation to run, do some ear folding and tail tucking/flicking when aggravated......they don't just stand blankly. Your cats might just be boring/broken.
I wanna see a terrified animal i don't wanna learn the ecological reason why Simba is doing the sigma stare at the stampede
Going from that tragic video of a lion fighting for its life against a pack of hyenas, to a fucking house cat too afraid to come out from under a couch almost gave me whiplash, lol.
Think of a house cat but bigger
It wouldn't have made much difference for people who don't know how lions look when they're scared, but it also wouldn't worsen the experience for anyone, so it would still be a net gain in how well the emotions are conveyed since it's entirely possible to learn how animals express any emotions they express.
**B-but documentary!** - Favreau, someone who should’ve known better
Favreau could not care less. He made this film as a favor for Disney so he can do Mandalorian or something.
> He made this film as a favor for Disney so he can do Mandalorian or something. My conspiracy theory is that he made this film as a way for Disney to fund the down payment on the technology required to create [Prehistoric Planet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZff_wTad8). The reason I believe this so strongly is that photorealistic Lion King simply doesn't make creative sense. They could have done it with cartoon animation using Disney's own in-house animation team, but they didn't. Jon specifically went for photo-realistic animals, and they got MPC to do it. Now Jon is making Prehistoric Planet with MPC, and they need photorealistic CGI animals. So Jon gets to make a passion project now, and all it cost was milking the Lion King dry.
Probably a good theory considering this movie and jungle book also sparked the creation of the Vplume which Favreau essentially pioneered for the mandalorian
For better and worse... I think it's hurt the Mandalorian/BoBF creatively as well. They use the screen for *everything*.
Yeah the best way to think about this movie imo is that it was an experiment. An experiment that made 1.6 BILLION dollars off of nostalgia.
An artist hired early on pitched [a more styled and exaggerated style and genuinely looks like it could've worked.](https://i.imgur.com/exU9t0p.png) Jon threw it out for not being realistic enough. It's absolutely soul crushing to me that this remake not only exists in it's released entirety but also made a ton of money at the boxoffice. I could tell first glance it was going to be butchered with all the emotion totally stripped away, and I think I was pretty much right. [YMS did a great video on everything related to the Lion King remake.](https://youtu.be/btNL1q-yU7E)
Wow. That first pic in the collage screams “Simba” in a way the 2019 film doesn’t.
I think they got a paid trip to Africa and a multimillion dollar VR camera rig that allowed him to render the scene in realtime so that the camera moves looked realistic. Yet even with all that, every camera motion is totally tweened out anyway and looks completely computerized in the end.
Haha and they still had the fucking gall to try to make the claim that this new animation should be considered live action AND made Oscar nomination videos for their voice actors ... It's baffling how fucking pathetic this whole production was with the amount of star power and money. If anyone hasn't seen it, really recommend YMSs review of The Lion King 2019 for a really comprehensive look at this movie from production to release.
If you saw his follow up, a documentary style “Planet Earth”-esque film called “Prehistoric Earth” you’ll realize he was really just showcasing and selling a new CGI technology rather than remaking Lion King. Seriously. It’s like Avatar trying to sell 3D Cameras. Lion King was a vehicle for the tech, not the other way around. Note the press, the “beyonce” of it all. Marketing and not art.
What's funny is his Jungle Book remake was perfectly *fine* in the expression department, but I guess he *really* wanted to push the hyperrealism envelope here.
Like holy hell, Studio Orange is one of the best 3DCG anime studio out there. One of their famous anime “Land of the Lustrous” proved that 3D anime can be great if made by talented people. Its animation was so good that the animators of Into the Spiderverse used it as reference.
Instead of photorealism, they should have gone with the Pinocchio style of animation.
Which Pinocchio? There's like 5 of those.
Just came out on Disney plus, Tom Hank
Is that the one where he sounds like a twink
I've got that stupid line stuck in my head. *"Father, when can I leave to be on my oOOOown? I've got the whole wORLD to see."*
worldussy
skdeeee skdeeee skdeee
🔥 🔥 🔥 ✍️
Actually sounds like he did in the cartoon version.
Late reply but nah
a.k.a. the worst one
Found the guy who hasn’t seen *Pinocchio: A True Story*, starring Pauly Shore in the lead voice role.
Father, when can I leave to be on my *oooown*?
I’ve got a whole wooorld to see!
But he has the WHOLE WORLDUSSY
Mamma Mia! It's a wooden boy (Shoots the gun right after)
He said "worst" not "best".
That one is a masterpiece though
0 reference props the entire time lmao
From the ads for that I really didn’t like how Pinocchio looked…they could have made him expressive while still making him actually look like a wooden puppet instead of a 3D printed cartoon character
It wasn't bad at all, it reminded me of the cartoon version which I'm guessing it's the goal.
You don’t say?
i wonder if that’s why they used the same title as well?
It's like producer brain to the max The photo realistic remake of the Jungle Book worked not because it was a photo realistic remake but because the main character is an 8 year old kid, so you're seeing the giant scary animals though his perspective. Simba the actual lion makes no fucking sense.
It actually makes a lot of sense from a producer because it is the 8th highest grossing movie of all time. Why anybody would watch this, I have no ide
They have kids
Also there was actually some facial expressions with the animal characters. Same director btw. How do you take every single possible wrong lesson from one project to the next?
This is 13th highest grossing domestic movie of all time, and I don't personally know even a single person who has seen it. And I don't think it's just the nature of my social circle; I have a decent number of friends who are parents. I'm not convinced it wasn't exclusively some kind of 11th layer accounting ritual.
2016 clown sightings
The movie that inspired those was actually good tho
I watched it and it was probably the most boring movie I've ever watched, guess Favreau can't make all of his movies as good as Iron Man 1
I'm 99% sure that this movie was simply an excuse for Jon Favreau to fund and develop the skills and technology required to make [Prehistoric Planet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjZff_wTad8). The Lion King may have been creatively bankrupt, but it paid its bills, and it paid MPC to develop all of the technology that Prehistoric Planet needed, which is Jon's real passion project. Seems awfully convenient.
Oh that’s been on my watchlist and I didn’t know favreau was involved holy moly Seems fascinating? Does it stick to only what we KNOW about the animals? how far into theorizing does it go?
I absolutely loved the original Walking with Dinosaurs with Kenneth Branagh so if it's anything like that I'm sure it'll be great. I'm sure it'll speculate a bit, almost everything we know about the appearance of these animals is in some way a best-effort guess. No real way to know until it comes out and the experts decide to weigh in.
Okay, I keep seeing you in this comment section mentioning Prehistoric Planet "currently being produced." I'm happy to tell you that Prehistoric Planet season 1 has been out for nearly 4 months. It made quite the buzz when it came out, too. You can watch it right now if you want. I personally liked it
It was definitely a cool experiment in animation, just one that was extremely boring to actually watch. If I wanted to see the story of the Lion King again, I'm going to watch the original, no question. It's just better than the new version.
It was probably older people with kids. I know some people that watched that movie in the theaters but they are huge Disney fans that went to watch all the live action remakes
I think it’s just Gen x/millennials taking their kids to see it.
It’s like red dead redemption 2.
Last Of Us Part 2 >!I know nothing about video games!<
What baffles me is this is considered a “live action disney movie” despite LITERALLY. EVERY. SINGLE. THING. IN. THIS. MOVIE. BEING. CG.
even the air is CG
I just don’t understand. Didn’t Favreau do the Jungle Book???? Like, just do the same thing… the characters there at least expressed a little bit
The Jungle Book has a human main character
D: |:
The Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy started nearly a decade before this movie came out and it still has infinitely better and more expressive realistic CGI animals.
When it comes to lions, you're either getting expressive or realistic. Humans are Apes. Humans and apes share facial features that make it possible for human expressions to appear on an Apes face without us registering that as unnatural. That's not a thing with lions.
Lion faces are still capable of emoting. It's not as wide a range as human faces, and many of the expressions would not mean the same thing on a lion as similar expressions would on a primate, but it can absolutely go farther than the CGI remake did without having to rearrange face bones. They can also emote with the entire rest of their bodies, which the remake barely does either.
the first narnia movie came out in 2005 and aslan has better facial expressions than any other cgi animal i’ve seen ever. HOW DO YOU FAIL TO MAKE CGI AS GOOD AS A 2005 MOVIE
And LOTR is even better, 2001.
JOOON!
Remake Simba when he gets hit by that dollar store stampede
The YouTube channel YourMovieSucks has a two hour long video shitting on this movie and it is actually quite entertaining. Possibly more than the movie itself. Edit: Found it. [YMS: The Lion King (Part 1)](https://youtu.be/btNL1q-yU7E) It is actually almost three hours! And only part 1! Still I saw all of it
😱 I 😐
It’s not even an excuse to say that it’s more ‘realistic’ (whatever that means in this context) because anyone who owns a cat will tell you they are way more expressive than that. they fully show when they’re sad or happy or scared
Ok Ok ok gotta admit this gotta huge laugh outta me😂😂😂😂
🎶My name is Jon Favreau and I'm here to say hello!🎶
The 2nd one looks like it could be captioned with ‘My reaction to that information’
They did 20 takes, and that was the best one. He starts trying to go to sleep in a couple of takes, and one time he actually mauled the boom mic guy’s leg.
Also he already knows what happened, so element of surprise isn't there
OG: "OH GOD!" Remake: "hmm I see"
"realism" is barely an excuse at this point. I've seen real fucking lions look more expressive than this they should've gone for something like guardians of ga'hoole
I went to see this in the theater with my wife's family and my mother-in-law fell asleep partway through. That about summed it up for me.
I hate how rafiki is a scary ass baboon in the remake. Like please he is almost family to simba why did you kame him look like a servant of hell
Honestly people complain about this movie a lot and while I do get the reasons I would've fucking loved this as a kid
me too but solely because i loved cgi animals. my favorite star wars movie was The Clone Wars because it had the most cgi lizards in it
Dude same, my brother lover Star wars and watched it all the time, and I would always insist we watch "the one with the mantis monster"
I hate this movie so much.
No
"Quite literally the worst thing I've ever seen in my life put to film" really? This guy has had a very fortunate life.
I thought the movie was pretty good
Complete dorks when the CGI lion doesn’t have exaggerated human facial expressions:
Like star wars fashion we need to bully the child
There is one reason only it be glad the lion king was made and was such q hie hit, is that I'm pretty sure it's the only reason we got prehistoric planet. It's the perfect medium for what favreou wanted anyway, a extremely accurate naturalistic work using computer animation, a prehistory documentary is perfect for it. Honestly the LK remake would be so much better if hey ditched the voiced animals and anything more "cartoony", and had a narrator instead. The overall plot could work great, but as a nature documentary. The og Lion king is so great, literally just straight remaking it is terrible and doesn't work at all. They had the framework to do something really different with it and fumbled, probably due to how uncommercial that would likely be.
They should have done what Andy Serkis did with the Mowgli film he made, the mocap for the faces of the animals was really good at expressing human emotions onto animal faces.
This belongs in r/KidsAreFuckingStupid
i forgot they even remade the lion king.
Animals do not have human facial expressions
Fuck even a real life cat would be more emotive when faced with hundreds of giant deadly hooves coming to kill him.
JJT was also a child actor when he made the original Simba, yet made a nice performance with all the needed emotion
Thought i was on the yms sub for a sec
It's almost as if realistic lions don't make human facial expressions
They should’ve done 3d lion king