Guys and girls lets be honest with ourselves Disney is going to be pumping out alot of remakes in the coming years regardless if we want them or not. However where as before it was one maybe two every few years it's now up to five in just this year alone and yes I was counting the upcoming Maleficent in that and well I thought that instead of telling you some fluff piece about why the live action Disney remakes are better then the original i'd go the opposite why and tell you why they don't work
To start of this recent trend of live action remakes is nothing new in fact the studio have been doing it since the nineties with a live action remake of The Jungle Book and again a few years alter with 101 Dalmatians and it's sequel four years later 102 Dalmatians. So the company has been doing these remakes for a long time but i'd say that things really kicked into high gear with the release of 2010's Alice In Wonderland.
Since ever since then they've been churning them out of the regular and alot of them have the same problem or sometime problems in common. The first being they have nothing to do with what ever film there remaking the 2010 Alice In Wonderland has nothing to do the 1951 original outside of the title and a few characters and that's an issue here because when going into this film and given who the director is people wanted to see weird imagery but instead what we got was something dark and depressing and that's not Alice In Wonderland at all.
The second issue that alot of these films have is that there more interested in cashing in on the name rather then fixing any issues with the previous film. If you look at films like Beauty And The Beast and The Lion King those remakes are more bothered about telling the exact same story in the exact same order then they are about fixing any issues that the original film had which to me defeats the purpose of a remake in the first place however to Beauty's credit it does at least try to solve some of the original films issues but it also creates more issues and those are issues that the original film never had.
These films have no idea what to focus on for every film that trys to do something new like the first few minuets of Maleficent there are several that are more interested in telling the same story. That to me says that even Disney have no idea what there doing and picking these films not because the original was flawed and could be fixed but because the original was a hit and so by that logic the film should be a hit as well.
Since she has a new movie out next week let's take a look at Maleficent from 2014 that film was promoted as being a story all about Maleficent and for the first ten to fifteen maybe even twenty minuets it was all about her. However it soon became apparent that this was in fact a remake of Sleeping Beauty so it took what could have been a cool idea how Maleficent became evil and turned it into something that we already saw so it wasted a good idea for the sake of telling the same story over again.
Which is a shame because telling a Maleficent origin story does sound like a good idea and it could very easily have held it's own film. Imagine if the opening of Maleficent was the whole film they spent time making us fall in love her and wanting to her succeed wouldn't that make her downfall more tragic and more heartbreaking but because Disney only cares about remakes rather then fresh ideas instead we get a sloppily told remake of Sleeping Beauty.
Now like many of you I was pretty excited that they were doing a Kim Possible movie however it lacks two things that the show had. Those being charm and identity because this is a remake it has no identity of it's own so it's always going to be tied to the Kim Possible brand name and it doesn't help that the film did nothing to at least make an effort to carve an identity of it's own since it's more focused on shoving iconography from the show down your throat.
The show was full to the brim with charm heck outside of the action it's charm was one of the things that made it standout. So you;d think that the movie would honour that and have plenty of charm as well and well you'd be wrong just like alot if not all of the remakes that have been released so far this one feels soulless it feels like the only reason it was made is because Kim Possible is now considered nostalgic and not because they had a good story or something new to say.
Two of these films do try to keep things fresh by adding in new characters which wouldn't be a bad idea if all of them added to the actual story. When we go to see Dumbo we want to see a heartwarming tale about an elephant just trying to get back to his mother and nothing more we don't however need nor even wanted to see a bunch of drama with a bunch of characters that we don't even know that's not Dumbo to anyone really.
Now I will state right here and now that Aladdin 2019 is the best of the live action Disney remakes but even so the character of Dalia was pointless. She adds nothing to the overall story and her whole romance with The Genie could have been dropped from the film and nothing would have been lost and the same could have been said for her. If your going to introduce a new character then make that person relevant to the plot don't just have them in a few scenes and stick them in a side plot that doesn't connect to the main one.
The original Aladdin while it most likely didn't have to create original characters and I say most likely because i've not read the source material. It at least makes all character main or not important to the overall plot and I don't honestly feel that Dalia is important to the plot of this remake and so you have to wonder why they even went to the trouble of creating a new character when they could have just picked a character from the original and gave them her role in this film.
I will never doubt this alot if not all of these films look visually stunning even if you hate every live action Disney remake that's out that is something that you have to admit to be true. However the issue is at least for me there's no meat to them there just focused and dazzling you with the visuals that they don't even bother in telling a somewhat decent plot and while it is important for a film to be visually stunning it also needs a plot.
Now getting things to look like the animated film isn't a bad idea since that's how people expect certain things to look. However that to has it's faults since it doesn't allow the film to have some sort of identity which is already going to be hard considering it's a remake and so it needs every little chance that it can get but when things look exactly like the cartoon it makes people wonder "why don't they just watch the cartoon" instead of keeping them focused on this newer version.
I noticed this with both Beauty And The Beast and The Lion King but those two films were telling the exact same story in the exact same order. Which yes I know I touched on it before but it's a huge issue because instead of being creative and telling a new story with these characters only now it's live action. There more interested in giving us the animated films story which only makes people want to watch the animated film.
Due to the story being the exact same alot of the surprise and tension is now lost because we know what's coming and what to expect. Honestly both remakes would have faired (might be spelt fared) a little better with fans if they changed the story up enough that way even the fans of the original wouldn't know what to expect and thus could be taken on this ride the same as the new fans but nope Disney just cares more about cashing in on nostalgia then actually doing something that makes sense.
Disney cares about cashing in on nostalgia so much that they are now in the process of remaking a film that's not only important to animation but also important to them. That film being Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs it was the first animated film to be released in North America and it was also the first film to be released by Walt Disney and it absolutely shouldn't be remade because of how important it is.
Could the original be improved upon yes of course but that doesn't mean that it should he remade classic films like this should be preserved the way they are. Snow White is a classic in every sense of the word and the fact that Disney have decided to remake this over a film like Home On The Range which could do with a remake to fix it's issues to proves what i've been saying all the time in this post they only care about nostalgia and making money from it.