dos disney

Watched two Dis­ney films, Spi­der-Man: Far from Home and The Lion King remake.
 

spi­der-man: far from home (2019)
I’ll make the first one brief. It’s an­oth­er ex­cel­lent Spi­der-Man en­try that nails each char­ac­ter, in­clud­ing the vil­lain and the old fan-favourite whom I will not spoil. 

Pe­ter Park­er and MJ have a charm­ing chem­istry, which may re­flect in that the ac­tors are ac­tu­al­ly dat­ing. Jake Gyl­len­haal is great as Mys­te­rio, who is a nice mod­ern up­date of the old time character.

Not hav­ing a sig­na­ture cos­tume in this Spi­der-Man al­lows the mak­ers to de­sign new ones for him, à la Iron Man. 

And I was glad to see the Noir cos­tume, my favourite.

Spider-Man’s core strug­gle, bal­anc­ing be­tween hero and nor­mal life, was well writ­ten, which is not al­ways the case in Spi­der-Man films and can­not be tak­en for grant­ed. He con­stant­ly tries to en­gage with his class­mates and the love in­ter­est, but is al­ways in­ter­rupt­ed by things out of his con­trol or even his own mistakes.

I haven’t seen Into Spi­der-Verse (2018) yet and can­not com­pare this film with fair­ness, but its should be safe to say this is among the best. 8.5/10
 

the lion king (2019)
I’m Japan­ese, so I have a love/hate re­la­tion­ship with the orig­i­nal (1994).

I like the film it­self, but it’s a whole­sale knock-off of a fa­mous Japan­ese man­ga that Dis­ney tout­ed as their ‘first orig­i­nal work.’ And I have not for­giv­en them for their bla­tant dis­re­spect to Os­amu Tezu­ka to this day. 

Please do me a favour and watch this video if you are un­fa­mil­iar with the subject:

Hav­ing said that, the orig­i­nal Lion King tried hard to be unique and fun, in com­par­i­son to this soul­less remake.

writ­ing
The sto­ry is ex­act­ly the same, but there are a few scenes added, all of which were used to over-ex­plain the plot points that served just fine, and made me go ‘why did you elab­o­rate on that?’ It only serves for more de­tailed lo­gis­tics, but nev­er the sto­ry or char­ac­ter de­vel­op­ment. Have you ever won­dered how adult Nara left Pride Rock?

re­al­is­tic look
Much like Dum­bo or Al­addin, this re­make was a stark re­minder of how much emo­tion one can add to any char­ac­ter in tra­di­tion­al an­i­ma­tion. One can­not tell the emo­tion from the face of talk­ing an­i­mals in live ac­tion films. Take Mufasa’s death for ex­am­ple, Sim­ba scream­ing at his father’s death just looks like a scream­ing cat in the re­make, and your emo­tion­al re­sponse have to come from any­thing but vi­su­al (i.e. voice act­ing, mu­sic, and nos­tal­gia). In the orig­i­nal, you can watch it on mute and still un­der­stand ex­act­ly what Simba’s emo­tions are.

An­i­ma­tion also al­lows for more un­re­al­is­tic ex­pres­sions. The orig­i­nal “I can’t wait to be king” scene has its own vi­su­al style, so does “Be Pre­pared.” Now, both of which are just shots of singing an­i­mals with no change in tone, and so un­der­whelm­ing. They no longer fit in the film but have to be present, be­cause the orig­i­nal had them.

voice act­ing
They are fine, but felt most­ly dis­con­nect­ed from the char­ac­ters. The only good ones were John Oliver’s Za­zoo, and Ti­m­on and Pum­ba. The lat­ter two worked most­ly be­cause there were more jokes added (you can’t re­peat jokes to be fun­ny, so at least the writ­ers tried to be new here).

I ad­mit, it’s ob­jec­tive­ly not the worst Dis­ney re­make; all the Tim Bur­ton ones dom­i­nate the bot­tom end (Al­ice and Dum­bo). On the scale of cre­ativ­i­ty how­ev­er, this Lion King and Beau­ty and the Beast (2017) are the worst of­fend­ers and most ‘safe’ ones. 

It was de­press­ing to see the oth­er peo­ple in the the­atre were eat­ing up this 118 minute mess, which is 30 min­utes longer than the orig­i­nal by the way (at this length, it’s no longer suit­ed for the tar­get au­di­ence of the orig­i­nal. It’s clear the new one aims to bring in more adults with the nos­tal­gia). It is also a shock­ing re­al­i­sa­tion that even straight-to-video se­quels – Disney’s then C‑tier projects – have tried hard­er than this. ⁴⁄₁₀

The best part of the film was when it end­ed, not just be­cause I was glad it was over, but the cred­its used my own ‘re­make,’ Al­ber­tus Nova.
 

—toshi oma­gari

Flom­mist Toshi Oma­gari fights many things, most re­cent of which is the auto-cor­rec­tion of his ti­tle to florist. Copy­right © 2019 Toshi Omagari.

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