Directors breathe live-action life into animated Disney classics

Adapting beloved, even classic animated films to live-action life is tricky. 

A potentially cultish audience with a huge emotional connection forged in childhood is already accustomed to experiencing these stories in a certain way

With all the reality-bending attributes animation brings to bear in creating fantasy worlds and characters. 

But as times and technologies change, Disney, which holds a near monopoly on animated features old enough to be considered a classic

Continues to reimagine its catalogue for a contemporary audience.

For the directors behind these tentpole adaptations, the question of what live action can accomplish that their animated predecessors couldn’t has been paramount. 

An alternate form also makes different aesthetic demands, leading the filmmaker further from the original when, for instance

Viewers might enter Bill Condon’s upcoming Beauty and the Beast with expectations created by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise’s 1991 version, and its Alan Menken/Howard Ashman score. So how to approach the needs of a live-action update and what can a director add to a classic?

“The answer for me, to ‘Why remake a perfect movie?’” says Condon, “was that the original always seemed to me to have its roots in a history of live-action movie musicals. That score didn’t feel like other Disney cartoon scores. Ultimately, though, I had to trust my own instincts about when to invent and when not to. For example, in the animated film, LeFou is basically a human punching bag for comic relief. But outside of Abbott and Costello, that’s not as interesting in a live-action context. So the essence of script development was figuring how to make these into credible, real characters.”

Sean Bailey, president of Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Production, believes Walt Disney himself would have made The Jungle Book photo realistically with CG technology, had it been at his disposal, as Jon Favreau did for the studio in 2016.

“As we start to look back and consider these movies,” Bailey says, “we feel the bones of the stories are timeless for a reason. But I think we have new things to say about gender and diversity to make these stories truly timeless, but also made for the 21st century.”

Disney has also turned 101 Dalmatians into live action under Stephen Herek and Cinderella under Kenneth Branagh, and has in the works The Lion King with Favreau, Dumbo with Tim Burton, Aladdin with Guy Ritchie, Mulan with Niki Caro and The Little Mermaid with no director yet attached. All either have or will meld varying degrees of live action with CG technology.

“It’s an interesting challenge,” continues Bailey. “I’ve noticed a big difference from the Walt era. With Lion King- or Beauty and the Beast-era movies, there are certain things the audience wants to feel, and certain moments and memories that they don’t want compromised or reinvented. But there are other elements where you are given great latitude, and that’s something we always talk a lot about at the beginning.”

Herek estimates his 101 Dalmatians followed 85 percent of the original’s narrative without having the dogs talk, as they did in the animated version. He used real dogs and wanted to keep it “as real feeling as possible,” rarely using CG with the Dalmatians for anything other than to create personifying expressions.

“One of my problems was, how do I get personality without having the dogs speak?” says Herek. “We did discuss having them talk but I wanted to use their natural lines of communication, which dogs do have. So that’s where ILM came in with facial tics and a head cock here or there. But my daughter grew on the movie and was 8 when I made it. It was very important to me that she wouldn’t look at the movie and say, ‘I hate that, it’s nothing like the cartoon.’”

A factor giving them some leeway, the filmmakers have found, is that memory functions imperfectly and that things one seems to remember with crystal clarity are in reality quite different.

“Even if something has the label iconic, it’s already been transmuted in your own viewer’s mind,” says Kenneth Branagh, surprised by how little he had remembered upon rewatching the original animated Cinderella. “I began to think, ‘Well, I suspect other people may find that they have the same experience.’”

In Jon Favreau’s case, the original Jungle Book was a lighthearted musical, a far cry from the scarier, adventure adaptation he had planned with photo-real jungle creatures, which raised the bar on visual effects.

“The balancing act,” he says, “is to make sure that you’re able to satisfy both the people who have a relationship with the original and to just tell a story as though it was something that nobody has ever told before. I personally had very strong memories of Jungle Book and, as an audience member, would be disappointed if we didn’t reference those aspects of the memory.”

Without referencing the original film, he assumed as a fan he would be a good proxy for an audience, so he sat down and listed the elements he remembered as an adult: the snake, Kaa, hypnotizing Mowgli and coiling around him; Baloo singing “The Bare Necessities” and paddling down the river; the tiger running through the burning woods; King Louie singing “I Want to Be Like You”; and Mowgli’s attitude. “I remember he wasn’t really a sweet kid,” says Favreau. “He was more realistic, more relatable when I was little.”

Through the process, Favreau found the resulting story unfolding not too differently from what was implied in the 1967 original.

Condon, for his part, felt it important to reference from the original Beauty and the Beast an iconic camera sweep of Belle and the Beast dancing, up to the painted putti on the ceiling. But more important was to translate that sweep into another moment that distilled the thrill of the move but offered something new. So Condon designed the sweep upward to reveal the cartouches on the wall coming to life as the orchestra for the song.

“When you’re aware of those iconic moments,” says Condon, “you either deliver in the way that is expected or you comment on and change in a deliberate way to surprise the audience.”

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Source: USA Today