Text/Gashua
In the grand castle built by animation giant Disney, the live-action film occupies a very inconspicuous position. Disney's countless classic characters, from Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella to The Lion King, are all animated. In recent years, however, Disney has seemed obsessed with turning some traditional classic animated stories into live-action versions. Both "Alice in the Mirror" and "Cinderella" have live-action versions, "Sleeping Beauty" has become "Maleficent", and the 1967 animated classic "Prince of the Forest" has become the "Fantasy Forest" in today's theaters. ".
It may be that the series of "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "National Treasure" launched in cooperation with gold producer Jerry Bruckheimer have made Disney taste the sweetness of live-action movies, or it may be to further explore the commercial value of the huge IP resources of animation movies. But behind this "enchantment", it is more likely that the advancement of technology has greatly increased the freedom of creating live-action movies, allowing Disney to complete the production of live-action movies just like animation.
If Disney’s old routine is the kind of family movie with simple and cute images and basically “harmless” stories, then animation has given Disney the greatest creative freedom for a long time. Through the excellent design of a group of talented animators, countless extraordinary images leap to the screen. As long as the designer has an idea, the form of animation can realize it quickly and flexibly, and serve the purpose of Disney with a kind of purity. When the same thing is put into a live-action movie, the process is much more complicated. From casting, actor performance, scene selection, to freedom of editing and mise-en-scene, wherever there are real people, there are limitations and impurity.
An American critic once summed up the basic characteristic of Disney films as "cartoonizing" all characters, especially animals. "Cartoonization" also means simplification and flattening. As Robert Bresson showed in "Balthazar", a real donkey, its image is vague and ambiguous, because you can't give it a simple and bright image, it often arouses the audience's recognition Know confusion. Through "cartoonization", Disney can endow all animals with pure characteristics, stupid, shrewd, dull, stupid, and honest, thus ending the chaos and completing the "harmless" process.
When Disney is making live-action movies, the "cartoonization" process doesn't go smoothly if real animals are cast as characters. From 1959's "Fantastic Dog" to 1996's "101 Dalmatians", although there are many commercial success stories, but from these real animal characters have never produced a great screen image like Mickey Mouse.
Now, with breathtaking CG technology, this has fundamentally changed. While we were still marveling at the computer-generated vivid tiger in "Pi's Fantasy Drifting", "Fantasy Forest" has used computer-generated entire forest worlds - from the shaking of a black panther's ears, to the canyon The entire galloping army of bison. And all this looks so realistic. These animals are just like the animals we see in Animal World or BBC wildlife documentaries, except when they speak.
In The Jungle Book, the only real actor is the 10-year-old Neil Sethi, whose "human child" Mowgli speaks to a blue screen throughout the performance. do action. And the tiger named Sheri Khan, the black panther named Bagheera, the brown bear Baloo, the giant python Kao, and the gorilla king Louis, although they look like real animals, are essentially the same as Disney animation. There's no difference between those cartoon characters in the movie - none of them have the ambiguity and confusion of real animals. In the movie, Disney also invited Ben Kingsley, Bill Murray, and Scarlett Johansson to voice the animal characters, just as they also dubbed those animated characters, which made these appearances more realistic. animals like cartoon characters.
Now that you can make live-action movies like animation, with precise control over all the movements and characterizations of animal characters, why not do it? What's more, the IP library of Disney's classic cartoons provides a gold mine of remakes. In addition to these films that have already been released, Disney has planned to make live-action movies all of Disney's animation classics such as "Beauty and the Beast", "Mulan", "Snow White" and "Dumbo" in the next few years.
Back to the movie itself. "Fantasy Forest" does show an amazing forest world, but this world is more based on technology, and at most is "fake the real", and Disney's first year's masterpiece "Zootopia" released at the beginning of the year shows the world of animal civilization It is "more realistic", although the characters in it are all animation, but the laws of this society and the desires and emotions of these characters are more real. Director Jon Favreau admitted in a media interview that "Fantasy Forest" is mainly to experience new film technology, create virtual characters, and present a group of lively animals. These become the core of the film.
View more about The Jungle Book reviews
