The New Lion King trailer style transformed to resemble the animated version | Hacker News Reader

The New Lion King trailer style transformed to resemble the animated version

geekdommovies.com

137 pointsw-ll44 comments

Maybe it was inspired by the review by David Ehrlich?

> David Ehrlich of IndieWire panned the film, writing, "Unfolding like the world's longest and least convincing deepfake, Jon Favreau's (almost) photorealistic remake of The Lion King is meant to represent the next step in Disney's circle of life. Instead, this soulless chimera of a film comes off as little more than a glorified tech demo from a greedy conglomerate — a well-rendered but creatively bankrupt self-portrait of a movie studio eating its own tail."

Don’t lessen his achievements by connecting him with movie critics.

Cartoon eyes and to a lesser extent mouths did a lot to display emotion. We are too caught up in making things photorealistic that we miss out on these things.

I think most animators still understand that, and they know how to do animation properly (make it expressive, use brighter color palettes, etc), but I'm guessing that a lot of the producers and people involved in this particular film just wanted to make something "cool". The entire thing is basically a vehicle for Disney to show off their fancy rendering engine.

I couldn't for the life of me understand why they even decided on this project. With films like Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin they recreated the animated film as a live-action one, which makes sense to me as a worthwhile endeavor, regardless of the result. But here they've just converted one animation style to another, which I don't understand the creative need for, so I assume it's just a money grab.

With every Pixar film, the team learns something new or how to do something better. This has been said in multiple interviews with newer Pixar films that come out compared to the old ones.

Aside from the superb storytelling and all that, it makes the team push for new breakthrough in animation.

I can see Lion King serving as a real world project for Disney animators in the same way, and a way to get paid to learn and push the fold in realistic animation. Not saying that's the reason behind it as I'm sure remaking a bunch of these movies was likely planned already but if you can level up your team, learn something new in the process, and get paid for doing it, why not.

They are trying to build up material to drive their eventual lobbying for extending IP rights to lifetime of creator plus 2000 years. They are just looking back through their portfolio going “what’s easy to remake somehow” and going with photorealistic remakes of all the animal movies was an easy one.

Remember. Disney is a theme-park & toy company that does movies as commercials/branding. But the first two businesses are critically dependent on retaining all the IP rights for the movies in perpetuity.

This most most brought out to me in Beauty and the Beast. Mrs Potts in the cartoon felt warm and human. The CGI Mrs Potts in the new Beauty and the Beast felt creepy.

Much of the same applies to Lumeire.

The only big movies I know of with talking, photorealistic animals are the Jungle Book remake, and this Lion King remake. “Caught up” is a bit of a stretch when most anthropomorphic stories are still heavily stylized.

They’ve also remade Winnie the Pooh, Aladdin, Dumbo, and others. They are currently remaking The Little Mermaid, Mulan, and Lady and the Tramp. The entirety of Disney’s classic animated catalog is fair game apparently.

Of course not every remake has sparked the same level of outrage, and it’s not always directed at the CGI. Aladdin took flak because they replaced Robin Williams’ Genie with Will Smith, and he wasn’t expected to be as good.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Disney_live-action_r...

Too bad they don't plan to do the Black Cauldron. If you haven't seen it, it's almost unimaginable it was ever produced by Disney.

You’re in luck:

> On July 16, 2019, it was reported that a live-action remake of The Black Cauldron is in early stages of development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cauldron_(film)

No doubt it will be heavily modified...

>Aladdin took flak because they replaced Robin Williams’ Genie with Will Smith, and he wasn’t expected to be as good.

Aladdin took flak entirely because the CGI genie they released in the teaser trailer looked so bad.

I don't recall much reaction to Will Smith's performance, pro or con.

None of those feature non-stylized, non-cartoony, talking photorealistic animals

That's because most of them didn't have a cast that was made solely of animals, but they do have their share of cringey CGI mistakes.

The Little Mermaid will feature photorealistic sea creatures, but we don't know how they'll turn out yet. Christopher Robin's Winnie the Pooh was photorealistic and looked creepy. The slightly less recent Beauty and the Beast had a bad looking Beast. The Jungle Book remake had a god-awful Baloo.

Disney's track record is not good with these remakes.

Peter Rabbit

We can make things photorealistic and still very expressive. See Rango for a fantastic example.

Of course the Disney artists know that, but that decision was likely well above their paygrade.

I’m very happy that Disney went whole-warthog in making the models realistic. This halfway between cartoony-but-real look isn’t good. The new Lion King was visually stunning and reminded me of a Nat Geo film. The characters didn’t emote very well, and the voice actors had to carry the performance, but at least the animals looked good.

(That’s not to say the story was great... but that’s also not the point.)

Detective Pikachu almost fell into the uncanny valley with some characters (especially the ones with the “real” eyes) for the same reason.

For 3-D cartoon animals, IMO Zootopia’s style really hit the sweet spot of cartoony-but-recognizable species.

Wow, 5 downvotes in under an hour for stating my opinion. Would somebody who thinks otherwise like to share?

I'm just not sure there's much substance to my opposing opinion - I simply think the transformed version looks incredible. I was blown away by the results. I saw all the emotion and affection and beauty of the stylized animation, plus the impressive fidelity of the CG. For me, they came together seamlessly.

It's a good comment, except that you complain about being downvoted, and I always always downvote that kind of meta whining.

Turns out without that meta-whining I’d be sitting at the bottom of the thread, and you wouldn’t have seen it. 30 minutes after making the edit it shot up 8 points.

I just don't find the "New Lion King" all that visually enjoyable aside from purely the appreciation for the talent required to make something look so realistic. I just don't think the various animals are all that compelling to look at as animated, fictional characters.

I view these as the equivalent of a video game company porting its older titles to new platforms. I have no data to support this, but I would guess that the next generation of kids isn't watching the old versions of Snow White, Cinderella, etc—at least, not at the same level. But Disney needs these movies and their iconography to be embedded in children's minds in order for the multi-billion-dollar merchandizing machine built on them to keep on printing cash. So Disney is bringing their back catalogue up to date.

Impressive work, but the end result is the worst of both worlds for me. If you want to make it cartoony, there's no need to keep the pretense of realism at all. Just go with Pixar or old Disney style animation.

The transformed version looks way better. They should hire that guy to do the whole movie!

It just looks like more saturated colors, but still similar texture detail. Was this done using standard color tools?

...Can you really not see the huge difference in the faces?

Maybe he has undiagnosed prosopagnosia.

I was watching on my phone and looking at the overall image texture.

The headline on reddit mentioned it was deepfaked.

the title of the linked video says it is a deep fake.

Now they just need to use this same tech to try and fix the sonic the hedgehog trailer.

I came to scoff but is very well done. Many recursion jokes lie in here.

Ah, I was hoping to see it the other way around.

Very impressive result. But Christ is it ugly.

which one?

The transformed version. It looks very uncanny valley to me.

I had the exact opposite reaction ...

Same. I wonder what it is about us that makes the visuals fine for us but uncanny for others?

Maybe he thinks the original is the transformed version

Hahaha that's a funny one but (at the risk of just adding a new comment that'll get just as downvoted) I've seen the movie so I know which one is real.

How can such a cartoony style look like it's in the uncanny valley?

it seems like the meaning of the term has been lost. the valley part refers to a curve. as in, as it becomes more realistic it becomes more uncanny, eerie, repulsive, until its indistinguishable. something cartooney would not fall in the valley of the curve.

i did not find the cartoon version eerie, it looked like a cute cartoon. the deepfake glitches were eerie at times, pumba especially.

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