Shiny Graphics /= Better Content

As reviews are starting to circulate for the yet-to-be-released 'The Lion King' remake (it's not "live-action" when the entire movie is animated...), there seems to be a general consensus that while the visuals are nice, having something so photo-realistic replace the hand drawn animation takes away the magic of the tale.

Before people shout back that "these are just critics opinions so they don't count," the 2019 film is currently sitting at 61% on Rotten Tomatoes and there is a mix of positive, praise-worthy reviews with the rest. You can disagree with critics, but stop blasting the lot of us. The majority take their job seriously and provide great insight into film, television, games, and books. Stop lumping all of us in with the ones looking for clicks.

Ahem.

What critics have focused on is something we gamers have been dealing with for decades. And thank you to this great article on The AV Club for pointing it out! The all-too-accurate look of the animals in 'The Lion King' clamps down the emotion. Why? Because animals don't move, act, or emote like they did in the hand drawn animation. In going for realism, the movie had to sacrifice the 'toonish aspects that allowed the animals to emote on a grand scale in the original film. We don't see anger, fear, sorrow, joy, or unreasonable feats of athleticism with the photo-real animals. Because if they were real, they wouldn't be able to do those things. A great example from Cartoon Brew shows a clip of the Hakuna Matata song. Watch how drastically different the animals are. And where does your eye naturally go to? Probably the animated version because it is much more engaged with showing the emotions of the animals.

Lions don't sing. They don't dance. They can prance, but they're not doing back flips into large ponds and hugging warthogs. This is where the new 'The Lion King' fails. In trying to do a shot-for-shot remake of the animated original but making it "real," it stripped away the emotion exuded by it's hand animated counterpart. Animation needed to emphasize the drama of the story.

How does this relate to video games? For decades there has been the push to make games "look and feel more real." If you look at any gaming area in a retail store or online, it's filled with Call of Duty and Battlefield in a fight to reign supreme on which game looks the best.

What's the most popular video game in the world right now? Minecraft. A blocky game about building with no photo-realism and cartoonish-like design. If you look at the top 10 list, 2 of the games would be considered semi-real in design (Tom Clancy and Red Dead Redemption 2), but even RDR2 knows when to pull it back on providing too much realism. For example, you're not required to babysit you character to make sure that he eats, sleeps, and uses the restroom in order to stay alive. These games take liberty in the accuracy department to keep the content engaging. Telling your character to go to the bathroom, waiting 5 minutes, reminding them to wash their hands - that's not fun.

Games capture our imagination with larger than life story-telling, and allow us to explore unique worlds without the restrictions of film and television. Cartoons and animation work the same way. It allows the creators to stretch what's possible with a bandicoot that wears pants and talking dragon's. Could you imagine a living equivalent of Wild E. Coyote? He would have been killed at the first anvil drop. Giving these fictional beings personalities requires them to emote on a grand scale. Meaning bigger facial expressions: when Spyro is sad, you know he's sad with how cartoony his face contorts to show the frown of his mouth and the droop of his large eyes. More modern games like Dragon Quest XI maintain this same concept with their characters, giving them over-the-top reactions and features to let the players feel those emotions through the screen. I know when Veronica (Dragon Quest XI) is mad where it's barely a murmur with a more real-looking Noctis (Final Fantasy XV). We're more compelled to continue with the plot where we can see the emotions, even if the story isn't good.

But we know that Disney and other big developers are not going to drop this need to chase for "realism." They want computer animated content to look like reality, and won't stop until they've achieved it. Thankfully there are a number of developers large and small who see the importance of keeping things simple. Sometimes the best stories are not going to look the flashiest. Sometimes the most compelling tales are point and click masterpieces.


Aside: Would anyone else have been down with the cast doing a real "live-action" version of 'The Lion King' if it was similar to the broadway version? I'd have paid to see John Oliver prance around in a Zazu-esque costume.