Disney’s live-action “The Lion King” remake comes out this weekend. But it’s not really live-action — even in the year 2019, lions still haven’t figured out how to speak. This is an animated remake of an animated movie. Disney’s brilliant innovation is to make the animation super realistic this time around, because the one thing that prevented full enjoyment of the first movie was that the singing warthog didn’t resemble a real warthog.
Actually, this isn’t really a remake, either. Disney used to do remakes. The original “Lion King” was essentially a remake of “Hamlet.” “Beauty and the Beast” was a remake of a 19th century French fable. “The Little Mermaid” was a remake of a Hans Christian Anderson fairytale. “Aladdin” was a remake of an old Arab folktale. Back in Disney’s heyday, it would take darker, denser, more mature stories and refashion them into fun, silly musicals for modern children. The kitchen utensils don’t break into song in the original “Beauty and the Beast” — that was Disney’s invention. It required actual creativity, wit, and vision to take these stories and make iconic family films out of them. Who knew that a 1,000-page French novel about a deformed freak living in a church could become a cute 90-minute cartoon, or that the true story of a daughter of an Indian chief who was kidnapped and held for ransom by European colonists could become an endearing animated film featuring a talking tree, a raccoon sidekick, and Mel Gibson?
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