The "Lion King" trailer reveals a challenge for Disney's remakes



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On Thanksgiving Day, Disney launched a roar heard on the Internet with the release of the teaser for his remake of The Lion King. Already, he broke records of views, becoming the second most viewed trailer behind the first. Avengers: Infinity War teasing. Director Jon Favreau has had previous success in the world of Disney remakes with The jungle Book (2016), which brought in $ 966.6 million worldwide. There is little doubt that the mix of nostalgia and enthusiasm for a cast featuring Donald Glover and Beyonce is going The Lion King become a big hit when it opens its doors in the summer of 2019. Disney has (yet) managed to make gold by redoing its animated classics. With Dumbo, Aladdin, Lady and the tramp, and The Lion King knock next year, and Mulan In production and in preparation for 2020, it is clear that the giant studio will not slow this train so soon.

But the track that was traced from the Magic Kingdom was largely without twists. The teaser for The Lion King gave us piecemeal reconstructions of the original animated film. As an experiment, it's cool. But like a feature film? The Lion King must do more than give us a photo-realistic recreation of a movie we already have. Favreau may have some surprises in his sleeve, and the comedians will certainly double the film, but The Lion King will have to do a lot if she hopes to come out of the shadow of the original. With Disney's first decade of remakes and rehabilitations, a trend that began with Alice in Wonderland (2010), is it time to examine what the model actually offers: magic or just the memory of it?

Although remakes and re-enactments in other genres and by other studios are often considered unnecessary and generally fail to gain ground at the box office (A star is born notable exception this year), Disney often gets a pass. Whether it is because we are desperately seeking to regain the feeling of the past, because Disney is as much a brand as it is an identity, or because we can not resist the curiosity that aroused the return of the past. a familiar intellectual property, Disney's remakes have become some of the most anticipated films of world culture. We can resist the very idea of ​​remaking, but many of us are drawn to these films. I readily admit that I am in the theater for each of them and that I am certainly not above the phenomenon. The first film I saw was The beauty and the Beast (1991), so how could I not appear?

This feeling is repeated on social media, and any keyword search for The Lion King Moviegoers will share their enthusiasm for the upcoming film related to their love for the original of 1994 – a loving love of childhood experiences or parental memories. We are a generation of grown children, parents and teachers with Disney in the blood. We are infected and we can not save ourselves because we would reject an antidote anyway. Disney knows it, and his remake plan therefore seems to be mostly good movies that nostalgically recall the fact that many of us, kids, have experienced great movies for the first time. Disney provides us with cinematic proxies so we can get as close as possible to our experiences. But it may be at the cost of new experiences, new memories and new ways of looking at these characters and stories. It's not because Disney is part of us that we are not sick.

Disney's post-2010 remakes are like The jungle Book and The beauty and the Beast (2017) were perfectly enjoyable, but they do not exactly make daring choices, even if they add some new wrinkles. I would venture to guess that many of us who know the original animated movies have a good time with these remakes, but do not go away if you feel that the originals have been passed. Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella (2015) is an exception. Lily James's opinion of the main character is progressive, and although the narrative rhythms are largely the same as those of 1950, Cinderella is less concerned with slippers and feet than with a real human connection. Cinderella and Prince Charming, Ella and Kit, both have a depth of character that the first adaptations of Disney's fairy tales have rarely allowed. In many ways, one has the impression that the kind of film that Disney would have done during his animated revival Cinderella not been adapted so early.

Maleficent (2014), The jungle Book, and The beauty and the Beast to have glimpses of what made Branagh Cinderella work, but they never nail enough the complexity of the character worthy of the live-action. Some narrative shortcuts that work in animation do not translate directly. While the maleficent links of the evil with the tragic relationship of Princess Aurora and the Beast with her father are exactly what stories need to shed new light on these characters, the films eventually become too concerned about the emotions of the surface and hit the beats of history and musical signals of the original really out of the book. They insist on the visual aspect but do not fully succeed in challenging these characters, nor us, with a quality of fairy tale that is not only morality but a world made strange by the absence of absolutes. We can only imagine what The beauty and the Beast would have looked like Guillermo del Toro, but I relied on his best fairy tale, The shape of the water (2017), it is certain that he would have created a tale not for adults who wish to return to childhood, but for adults ready to embrace the strange magic of adult life.

Disney has experimented with these stories to bring them closer to the age of adults and teenagers who grew up with animated films in both their first modern rehabilitation and their most recent. From Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland saw Alice (Mia Wasikowska), an adult, return to Wonderland, after rejecting a suffocating society, to regain her identity as a feminist. But Burton, who managed to create one of the best adult fairy tales with his adaptation of Daniel Wallace's film Big fish in 2003, could not quite get by in the world of Lewis Carroll and was trapped in the search for meaning in a world that rejected it in a refutable way. Burton's portrayal of Carroll's world through the themes of the film finally turned out to be empty, even as the film made over a billion dollars in the world and spawned a sequel, Alice through the mirror (2016), which is the only remake of Disney.

This year Christopher Robin earned $ 197.1 million worldwide, partly because of China's anti-Winnie stance. While the adaptation of A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard Winnie the Pooh is not based on a fairy tale, he still managed to find a magical relevance inspired by a little inspiration from Steven Spielberg. Hook (1991). Making Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor) an emotionally closed adult and placing him in a world that still smelled of the ramifications of World War II allowed director Marc Forster to take risks with the property for a poignant and somber result. , despite his humorous anthropomorphic stuffed animals. Although some critics were more interested in his ability to provide nostalgia and criticized his gloominess, Christopher Robin provided that exactly what these Disney remakes and rehabilitations should be after: a review of what childhood experiences can bring to adults, not by going backwards but moving forward.

At this point, there is no financial risk for Disney involved in these remakes and rehabilitations, and it is time for his films to take more and more creative risks to reflect that. With Burton Dumbo first release in 2019, it seems that Disney is on the right track; The trailer suggests that the film explores how our losses and disabilities make us stronger. With a little luck, we'll see a the Lady and the Tramp who calls into question his love to find love outside classes and races, Aladdin who finds his hero take responsibility for what it means to have three chances to control not only his fate, but that of others, and Lion King which explores political decisions related to the natural order of things and the question of whether it is right.

Animated films do not go anywhere and their stories always have an audience of all ages. It is time to recognize these characters and worlds as part of the myths they represent and not to ask how far it is possible to keep the same principle, but how different can it be to help us explore and understand the world in a new way. There could be movies for which children raised in animation films could mature. Disney can not find the magic of the past, but it can give us a new magic, and 2019 will be the test to see if it is up to the challenge.

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