This is of course inspired from that “AI entrepreneur” douchebag that spent $745 to commission a treat printer to print out a shitty and soulless whitewashed version of Princess Mononoke and assigned himself that title the way that putting a quarter in a gumball machine makes someone a candy entrepreneur.

I really don’t have a good answer. Anyone else?

  • AernaLingus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    I don’t really see the appeal, either. They’ve made money hand-over-fist so clearly there’s an audience for it, but idk…if I want to watch Aladdin, I’ll just go watch the original and not a soulless cash-grab live action remake. I guess the question is how much of that is people clamoring for live action and how much of that is induced demand where people just go see whatever slop Disney puts out.

    One thing that doesn’t make sense to me (even if it does seem to be true to how the industry operates) is why live action is seen as strictly superior. It’s not like the people making Aladdin or Princess Mononoke wanted to make a live action film but had to settle for animation–these were people at the very top of their field pouring all of their passion into their art! To just reproduce it in live action misses the point that it was designed for the animated medium from the ground up.

    Video game remakes are a different beast, since even though there can be drastic visual or even gameplay changes, the medium is the same. There are good and bad remakes, and reasonable minds can differ over which version they prefer, but it’s rare that the fundamental character of a game is completely altered. Like, obviously Pokémon FireRed is leagues ahead of Pokémon Red in terms of graphical and audio fidelity[1], features, and polish, but I also don’t think it’s too different from what the original team might have made if they’d had access to the GBA hardware. In sharp contrast, there is no universe in which Disney’s premier animation studio randomly makes a live action film in 1992.

    Also, the video game medium changes rapidly. The difference between the Gen I and Gen III Pokémon games is night and day despite only being 6 years apart, while the difference between Aladdin and The Emperor’s New Groove is mostly stylistic. The worst thing you might see in an older animated movie is some rough CGI, but it’s not like Alice in Wonderland has bad animation–far from it! If age plays a factor in enjoyment, it’ll be more about the content of the film than the technical execution. Meanwhile, the technical fidelity and conventions of older games can pose significant challenges to modern audiences, so remakes can remove those barriers by applying a fresh paint of coat and a tune-up while still delivering the same content and core experience.

    1. although I heavily prefer the Generation I chiptunes over the Generation III sampled instruments ↩︎