#I have no opinion on the sonic movies I just like seeing mufasa fail

[life-in-toontown]

Schadenfreude

[that-shamrock-vibe]

Disney+ What To Watch: My Top 10 Favourite Disney Live-Action Remakes

So we’ve covered the main Walt Disney Studios animated movies, and I am trying to find categories that I can slot other Disney animated movies into, but for now we are going to follow Disney’s latest trend and jump into the live-action field with my personal favourite top 10 live-action Disney remakes.

Now of course Snow White and the Huntsman will not be on this list primarily because it is not a movie released by Walt Disney Studios and also because it took me three attempts just to get through it. But I will also not be including sequels as they are not reworking animated movies but continuing the stories of the remade live-action movies, so 102 Dalmatians, Alice Through the Looking Glass and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil are also not in contention.

Also remakes of live-action movies, even if those live-action movie are in some form animation hybrids, also will not count, largely because I am only counting those under the official Walt Disney Animated Studios banner but also because there’s no real point.

As always please remember that these rankings and opinions are purely my own, I am not saying these movies are factually worse than others or better than others I am merely saying this is how I view them.

#10. The Lion King

The reasoning for this movie being at #10 despite how well it has done compared to other live-action remakes is purely because I had to check and make sure the title gif I am using for this entry was the one from the live-action remake and not the 1994 animated movie...I should not have to do that!

The problem this movie has, as many critics and fans have pointed out and I believe as I did in my review, is that this is effectively a shot-for-shot remake of said original animated movie. That doesn’t mean it’s not good because the original was a phenominal piece of cinema for the genre and the studio, but it does leave a question as to the relevance of bothering to remake something practically identical with the only USP being that this movie is completely CGI in an attempt to give it the “live-action” treatment.

That being said, I was somewhat entertained by this movie, but by different parts than how I was in the original. For instance, in the original Rafiki was my favourite character in terms of comedy and just as personal preference, here he barely gets anything to do and instead the likes of Sarabi and the Hyenas are more fleshed out.

I did enjoy how the Hyenas showed more of a pecking order in this version, with Shenzi this time being depicted more as the clan leader who is somewhat of a left-hand to Scar in the same way that Faora was to Zod in Man of Steel.

Also Sarabi, who is somewhat forgettable in the animated movie as she’s barely in it until really the end to the point where me saying she was Simba’s mother is the only real jolt some fans may have to remembering her, and the other lionesses had that one really tense scene with Nala trying to escape Pride Rock without being detected by the Hyenas and Scar in order to find help. I can imagine that being a very hard level on the game-version of this movie because I always hated stealth levels like this particularly in the earlier Harry Potter games.

Timon and Pumbaa come in and kind of steal the show half-way through and notably there is a bit more of them raising SImba even as an adult and both Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen do respectable jobs in their respective roles, in fact some have argued they are the best part of the movie because they bring some level of excitement to an otherwise bland remake.

To be fair, one of my favourite parts is when Timon begins to sing “Be Our Guest” as a way of distracting the Hyenas as live bait along with Pumbaa, this of course is reworked from the original when it was them performing a hula-inspired performance which I still love to this day, but this reworking did make me laugh.

Outside of that though, everyone really fills their roles as they did in the original, and it comes across as simply a pale imitation in comparison. It’s not like the other remakes where there was something new enough and exciting enough to differentiate the two. Yet this movie is longer than the original because the stuff that either is new or extended from the original feels like it has just been either shoehorned in because maybe the writers or Favreau himself believed they were lacking in originality or maybe they believed what they actually had was exciting.

The biggest misstep of this type is the almost three minutes spent following a piece of Simba’s mane on its journey from falling off Simba to reaching Rafiki and thus him discovering Simba is in fact alive. In the original, this wasn’t even a 30 second segment and they played up Rafiki’s shamanism a lot more to deduce this fact, but here the hair goes from river, to birds nest, to a giraffe’s digestive system, to a ball of dung, to an ant line until finally reaching him...all the while only promoting the admittedly impressive CGI.

Another example of this is at the beginning of the movie where there is more focus on the field mouse that Scar toys with before losing the opportunity to make it lunch, we spend a good 30 seconds to a minute more than the original as the mouse makes its way up to Scar’s den rather than simply starting off there. I don’t feel this is as big an offence as I do the hair scene but the time could easily be spent elsewhere.

There’s also, I feel, a disadvantage with trying to make these animals as realistic as they did. 2019 struggled with “realistic” CGI animals from The Lion King to Cats and Sonic the Hedgehog, and while Sonic fixed itself by having the titular protagonist’s design changed to a more accurate look, it is a shame that The Lion King did not also have the same idea because giving these lions more animated features may have helped show the emotional hot points of the movie, particularly Mufasa’s death and the emotion on Simba’s face.

It’s also a shame that the voice actors are underwhelming outside of Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen. I do appreciate that they cast regionally-appropriate actors for the most part, even bringing back James Earl Jones for one of his two most famous roles, but there in lies the problem, he simply performed an almost line-for-line redo of what he originally did in the animated version. It’s great hearing him again but I could have just watched the original again to hear him not do anything different.

You also have Beyoncé who fails at both scene-stealing acting and singing performances with her new original song which is hardly in the movie. However, while Beyoncé still delivers on star quality, she also outshines the movie’s main lead Donald Glover who feels like an acting school work experience placement compared to Beyoncé.

Finally the music, forget the rolling turn of mane, this movie butchers and wastes one of the best Disney Villain songs in history by having Chiwetel Ejiofor talk his way through one chorus line of “Be Prepared”...next to that having a lackluster shot-for-shot remake of “Circle of Life” didn’t seem so bad.

Overall, this live-action remake simply felt more like fan-service or even like Jon Favreau was too scared to touch what had come before and so just decided that simply having a fully CGI version of an animated classic was enough...but aside from simply looking at it, there is nothing really wondrous about this movie.

I can see why people like the movie, but I can’t really understand why people defend the movie even from a nostalgic point of view, I mean seriously just watch the original version you’ll get the same feeling out of it.

So what do you guys think? Post your comments and check out more Disney+ What to Watch Top 10s as well as more Top 10 Lists and other posts.