CGI Shoes: The Problem With “Live-Action” Remakes

When I go to write a review for my personal Letterboxd page, one of the things I do first is read the IMDb trivia. You never know what you’ll find there; sometimes, it’s things I already knew. More often, it’s things I can’t fathom why anyone would want to know. That’s fine. I’m interested in trivia in a broad sense anyway, so reading the specifics never feels like a waste of time. But one of the things I discovered when reading the IMDb trivia for the live-action remake of Cinderella was that the shoes were CGI, because they’d designed shoes that could not be worn on human feet and walked in. At very least, they didn’t fit Lily James.

There are a lot of problems with the live-action remakes, even leaving aside that The Lion King isn’t live-action and no one cares what Disney says. Frankly, the biggest problem with them is that they’re pointless. They don’t have anything new to say. What they add is generally agreed to be bad. And you can just, you know, go rewatch the animated originals instead, and Disney could be making more small family films that perhaps wouldn’t take in a quarter-billion dollars, as Moana has thus far—but also wouldn’t cost a quarter-billion dollars, as Moana apparently did.

My family watches the animated Moana pretty regularly. My nine-year-old daughter loves watching Moana and Te-Ka. I think she knows all the words to all the songs except for the ones in a language she does not actually speak. And more power to her. She has not expressed the slightest interest in watching the live-action version. Her thirteen-year-old brother, who still watches Disney movies with me, actively disdains them. By asking me what the point of them is, a question I can answer, but he doesn’t like the answer. Which is “fat sacks of cash money.”

Look, I know. Maleficent can be said to have launched us into the trend, and people who are not me loved it. It’s estimated to have been the sixth most profitable film of 2014—if I ran the world, Hollywood accounting would be considerably more transparent and this wouldn’t rely on estimates—making nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars at the box office. Cinderella likewise did very well indeed. Likewise The Jungle Book and Beauty and the Beast, the latter grossing over a billion dollars. The movies looked like a license to print money, at least for a while.

So okay, Dumbo not so much. A lot of people had excuses for it, none of which were that it wasn’t very good. That it adds far too many plots when the important part of the movie is, you know, the elephant. But it was a prime example of the problems inherent in the concept. It nearly doubles the length of the original movie without adding value. It’s got all of the problems of late-era Tim Burton movies. It’s big and flashy and has no heart. In a just world, it would’ve killed the trend, or at least made Disney consider what they were doing.

But Aladdin was already on its way. And Aladdin made bank. So did The Lion King. The Maleficent sequel turned a profit, if barely. Lady and the Tramp got dumped onto Disney+, so we’ll never know. But in the middle of lockdown came Mulan, which almost certainly was planned for the same kind of big release as the others and almost certainly would’ve bombed. Because while apparently it did fairly well with white critics, the backlash was deservedly enormous. The film was racked with controversy before it was even released.

While people liked Cruella, and the Lion King sequel did well, the omens are not good for Disney. And not just because, while writing, I asked my daughter about Moana and she said she wanted to see it to see how terrible it is. It’s probable that The Little Mermaid and Snow White were both harmed by racism, though the joke in this circle has been that we wanted people to start hating The Little Mermaid for the right reasons. But there is no such excuse for Pinocchio. Or Peter Pan and Wendy. Both of which were dumped onto Disney+ and forgotten.

And then there’s Lilo and Stitch. Now, let’s be clear—it is also making bank. But let’s also be clear that it doesn’t understand what makes the original so beloved and long-lasting. Or, as the joke goes, “’ohana means leave your sister with strangers and go off to the mainland when there are prestigious colleges in the field in Hawaii.” By changing the characters and the ending, they’ve destroyed the found-family value of the original. Yes, Lilo and Nani are sisters and love each other, but they end up adding Pleakley and Jumba—and, yes, David—because family is both blood and found. But we’ll make the family member a reformed villain I guess?

We’re free for about the next year, with several of Disney’s planned projects’ having been scrapped. There’s a Lilo and Stitch 2 coming out in 2028, and Tangled coming out some time that year, and three others with “TBA” release dates including movies about Gaston and Cinderella’s stepsisters. I doubt they’ll really get at the problem with all these movies, which among other things continues to be that they are unnecessary. I don’t need to know how Gaston became an arrogant jerk. I’ve known plenty of arrogant jerks, and I don’t care why they’re that way.

But there’s so much money put into these. The reason they’re not reliably making profits is at least in part the enormous budgets and the enormous advertising campaigns. I’m also very curious as to how often people watch them a second time. Are there kids who obsessively watch Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast at home, making their parents crazy and reaching the point where everyone in the household knows every line because of how often it’s played? We can’t really know, because viewing statistics are as opaque as the accounting, but I rather suspect not. I suspect that, when little girls dream themselves as Jasmine or Ariel or Mulan, it’s the animated versions.

Part of the issue is that people still see animation as lesser. It’s just not as valued as live action. Only three animated movies in history have been nominated for Best Picture, one Disney and two Pixar, and none since Toy Story 3 for 2010. Animation seldom gets nominated for writing and is not considered eligible for art design or acting. Disney does so like its awards, seeking legitimacy from the Academy. But these movies don’t get nominated, either, and when they do, they don’t win. The version of The Lion King that Disney acknowledges as animated won two Oscars and was nominated for four; the one they don’t was nominated for one and lost. The only one to win to anything was Cruella, for Costume Design.

There’s so much work to making these movies visually rich, but the great advantage of animation is that it pretty well costs the same to put your lead in a fantastic ballgown under a vast, arching ceiling as it does to put her in rags in a hovel. There’s a reason animation is such a natural medium for fairy tales, and that’s that all the things you do are visually blended by default. You don’t have to work to make the magic fit in; it just does. The reason Walt made an animated Pinocchio was that the little wooden boy fit with the humans. The horrific visual of the boys’ becoming donkeys doesn’t make you laugh at the bad CGI—and even there, the film employed the clever use of shadows.

I don’t want to imply that there’s no place for a live-action spectacle. But nothing Disney did with poor Emma Watson was quite so memorable as the sweep of gown and glorious ballroom of the original. They were talking about doing Robin Hood, and you can make a good Robin Hood movie. But there’s no reason for your good Robin Hood movie to involve the love story between two anthropomorphic foxes. Do something new and make your live-action version memorable on its own.

They hire people who can’t really sing for their musicals, simply because they’re big names, but Disney animated features have never needed big names to be big successes. My older sister and I may have been the only two people on Earth excited because Robby Benson was the voice of the Beast, after all. I don’t mean that you should sabotage the actors’ careers, the way Walt did to Adriana Caselotti, the original voice of Snow White, but there’s a reason voice acting is a job. Some people get the assignment—keep hiring Alan Tudyk, please—and some people phone it in, and with celebrities, you risk people phoning it in.

The movies also come across as bloated. In order to give you a reason to watch them instead of just watching the original, they extend the runtime. In the case of Dumbo, admittedly the shortest to be remade, nearly doubling it. The originals were lean and ran on all cylinders. The remakes plod along. They’re CGI shoes, all flash and glamour and no substance, not really made for humans but to look cool and reach a specific goal. For Cinderella herself, a human one; for Disney, fat sacks of cash money.