I really enjoyed his version of “The Jungle Book” so me and the kids will definitely be at this one.
The only thing wrong with the new jungle book was the original songs dropped into it. They looked and sounded like something from another movie and were tonally off. Hope they don’t do this with the godawful shite music in the original Lion King…
That would be the risk of making a lot of money instead of all the money.
This video makes me feel like Luke Wilson.
I recall being dragged to see the Lion King as a theatre musical. Still running in Hamburg, and it was all right. I mean, the costumes were interesting but the actors were so straightjacketed into the script that it got boring real fast.
I have low expectations, to be honest. It will do good enough to make a modest profit, but I don’t expect anything to appeal to an old Gen X’er like myself, and my kid is a college student by now, so I doubt I was ever expected to like it.
ETA : I saw this last night on twitter, and it feels important. The economics of the live action remake feels kinda skeezy
The evidence is pretty overwhelming that The Lion King is an unauthorized (and uncredited) Kimba the White Lion adaptation rewritten as Animal Hamlet. Luckily it was better executed and more entertaining than either of those things would be on their own.
As for this new version… it reminds me of that shot-for-shot remake they made of Psycho in 1998. There wasn’t anything wrong with it exactly, it’s just that it didn’t offer anything new or compelling enough to justify its existence.
Recent history suggests it will probably make enough money to keep the studio happy but is destined to be largely forgotten soon afterward. We’ve had a flood of live-action reimaginings of classic Disney classics over the last several years but if you ask a Disney fan to picture Winnie the Pooh or Cinderella or Baloo almost everyone is going to think of the cartoon version.
I bet most people don’t even remember that Disney made a live action remake of The Jungle Book in 1994.
I have never heard the “Robin Hood” version of the song. I thought it was “Dennis Moore”
Sure, all art builds on what came before it to some extent. The question is how much is changed. While the original had a similar story and theme as Hamlet, it wasn’t “animated hamlet.” The preview was obviously intended to remind adults who saw the original as a kid, and looked like an exact recreation of a key scene from the original. So some people think it will be merely a scene-for-scene recreation of the original with photo-realistic CGI instead of traditional animation style. Personally, that wouldn’t terribly interest me. Presumably they will at the very least update the musical styles even if the songs themselves are basically the same.
Now if they actually do a somewhat more adventurous remake, then that might be more interesting.
My general sense is that this is going to be a technically spectacular execution of a paint-by-numbers retreading of the original that ultimately has no soul, created to make boatloads of money and further entrench the stupid saw that traditional 2D animation is bad because it’s “for kids” and can’t do “realism”. Artistically, it’s just really, really dull, like Disney has caught up with the mid-2000s era of video games where everything turned brown and gray once it became possible to make objects that had more than 100 polygons in them and everything needed to look “real”. Of all the things to mute the colors of, Lion King is in deep deep last place.
And it’s not like you can’t make something as punchy as the original Lion King in live-action. Fury Road is basically nothing but a 2-hour assault of high-powered teal-and-orange color grading, and it looks incredible. Hell, even nature documentaries have punchier colors than most of this trailer.
Anyway yeah, I’m not really excited about this. Just… go watch the original.
Like finally openly admitting that Simba and Nala are half-siblings? Nothing like a little Game of Thrones action to spice up the plot.
Between that look on Nala’s face and Maid Marian from Robin Hood I’m pretty sure that Disney is entirely responsible for the advent of the “furry” fetish.
I met some at Pride this year; definitely a vague Disney vibe to the nice, fluffy ones. The PVC ones maybe not so much…
I’m really not sure what the point of re-skinning an animated film like this. As a fan of the original I’m contractually obliged to go see it but I will probably not grab me like the original did. A wartime meme pops into my head here:
If you think it’s just the female characters, you’re missing the whole ocean of Fox Robin Hood admirers of all persuasions (and also Nick Wilde… every generation gets their own 
)
Interesting.
edit It won’t let you search for just a question mark but I suspect you’re right.
In all seriousness, an entire fandom/subcurlter was launched by Fox Robin Hood.
<Rant> Also not a fettish, most fettishes have been expressed at one time in the fandom but by itself it’s not a fettish. </rant>
