3/30/2023 0 Comments Film actio n![]() Won’t the dragons be CGI? Won’t any scenes of humans flying atop dragons be entirely digital save for an occasional live-action human? What’s the point then beyond monetary gain? To “fix” wonderfully heightened dragon designs? To make an animated movie a “proper movie” by making it populated by flesh-and-blood humans? None of these answers are satisfactory. What’s the point of bringing Beauty and the Beast to live-action if the majority of the characters and backdrops are still animated, just now filtered through “realistic” CGI? For the prospective How to Train Your Dragon remake, it’s even more confounding. Modern blockbusters utilize so much CGI that they feature about as much original animation as your average Pixar or Illumination feature. To add insult to injury, so many of these remakes are practically animated films unto themselves. All the while, these remakes tend to deliver callbacks and homages reminding you of earlier animated movies with vastly superior visual aesthetics. Sequences that used to reverberate with such life and striking images you could only see in animation are now bending over backward to mimic things you could see outside your window. Richly-vibrant features like The Lion King have now been anchored to reality, their splendid color palettes sucked dry of any life. Salt then gets rubbed in the wounds by how the reinterpretations of these animated films tend to make use of visual aesthetics drained of color and personality. These live-action remakes already get off on the wrong foot by ignoring that truism in the pursuit of extraordinary nostalgia-informed profits. Those qualities would be difficult to properly translate into live-action, but they’re perfect for stop-motion animation. Yet Mary and Max uses stop-motion animation to create stylized character designs, striking visual gags, and a varied color palette that beautifully reflects the distinctive psychological experiences of its lead characters. Mary and Max, for instance, is a movie about two human beings communicating through letters, it’s not a fantasy epic. Even more grounded and realistic stories take on something extra special in animation. It’s impossible to imagine something like Spirited Away working nearly as well in live-action where it would be tethered to the restrictions of reality. ![]() Within animation, all the possibilities of a visual form like feature films can be exploited. The only limit in this medium is often your imagination. Just as there are limitless possibilities for the kinds of stories and target audiences animated movies can carry, so too is there unlimited potential in the images you can conjure up in animation. Though many dismiss it as merely a vessel for kid’s entertainment, animation can tell stories as varied as Flee to Fritz the Cat to Grave of the Fireflies. Existing nearly since the dawn of cinema itself, animation has spanned every genre, country, and tone imaginable in its existence. This is a beautiful artform that dates all the way back to 1906 with the short film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. But let’s begin things on an upbeat note by appreciating the medium of animation. Only time will tell when Peter Pan & Wendy hits Disney+ on April 28.This is going to be an essay crammed with negativity, most of it justified. Not only has Lowery gone for a more authentic casting with Canadian Cree actor Alyssa Wapanatâhk, but also looks to have better fleshed out the character than most other incarnations. Many previous Peter Pan adaptations have come under fire for the enforcing of Native American stereotypes with the character, while 2015's Pan was criticized for whitewashing with Rooney Mara's casting. One of the other major changes the Peter Pan & Wendy trailer seems to indicate is a more sensitive approach to adapting Tiger Lily. Law's Peter Pan & Wendy villain does look to have been given a far more terrifying tweak to his facial features, making him look more akin to a Pirates of the Caribbean antagonist. Unlike many other live-action Disney remakes that have come under fire for major design changes to their characters, both Tink and Hook look nearly identical to their animated counterparts. ![]() While Molony's character was shown in previous marketing, the Peter Pan & Wendy trailer does mark the first proper looks at Shahidi's Tinker Bell and Law's Hook, both of which mark promising signs for the film.
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