Ranking Disney’s live-action remakes

Live-action Disney remakes are best seen as the equivalent of Broadway musical versions: they add a few new songs, toss in some contemporary jokes, and throw a ton of money at special effects. Expecting the same kind of timelessness a second time is mostly a futile exercise: the state fair might book a talented cover band, but we’re listening to the original artist in our car or at home. This Pinocchio needed extra money or time, because the animation either looks unfinished or deliberately cartoonish, and the title character’s voice drastically changes from one scene to the next. Meanwhile, new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard lack the snappiness and easy-rhyming wordplay of classics like “I’ve Got No Strings” or “When You Wish Upon A Star.” Far be it from us to actively reveal what scuttles Zemeckis’ film, but let’s just say that it seems like the people who made its biggest creative choices have more wood for brains than the character they brought to life.

Technically, this new Lion King is as much a cartoon as the old Lion King; it’s been created entirely on computers, and features nary a single life-form or landscape not made from 1s and 0s. But like Cinderella, Beauty And The Beast, and the recent, embarrassing Aladdin, it’s a lavish Disney remake that detrimentally thrusts material conceived for animation into an effectively live-action world. At least those films anchored their nostalgia trips to real personalities. There’s almost nothing recognizably human in The Lion King, which labors under the bizarre misconception that anyone needed a photorealistic take on the Shakespearean struggle between talking, singing lions. Joyless, artless, and maybe soulless, it transforms one of the most striking titles from the Mouse House vault into a very expensive, star-studded Disney Nature film.

The first live-action Disney remake to debut exclusively on the new Disney+ streaming platform, Lady And The Tramp often has the feel of an expensive made-for-TV movie. Taken on its own, it’s a perfectly fine if somewhat generic kid’s film that aims to satisfy young viewers but won’t grate the nerves of any adults who might also be in the room. The problem is that it’s remaking one of the most gorgeous, mature films in the Disney animated canon, and doesn’t begin to rise to that high water mark.

The original animated Dumbo (1941) clocks in at only 64 minutes, a relic of the days when an afternoon at the movies meant a double feature with cartoons in between. Now, in an era when movies must be events unto themselves, Disney’s live-action redo of its flying-elephant fable runs just under two hours. That necessitates either a whole lot of padding or a complete rewrite; screenwriter Ehren Kruger, who’s new to the Disney machine but not to blockbuster filmmaking, splits the difference by keeping the barest minimum of the original plot and bulking it up with new characters and themes. Most of these are wholly expected—kudos to whoever gave a presentation to Disney brass on the importance of STEM education for girls, which has made it into two live-action films in a row. But there’s one plotline in the reimagined Dumbo that’s truly surprising, and even ballsy, when you think about it. Basically, the movie offers a metaphor for the evils of corporate mergers, with villainous circus mogul V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton) standing in for Disney itself.

This adaptation combines the fundamental building blocks from J.M. Barrie’s 1911 novel (and its preceding play) and Disney’s 1953 animated film to both greater and lesser effects. By changing elements—for legitimate reasons—it becomes a diverse coming-of-age tale, but it also loses a lot of what made its predecessors memorable and magical. While it’s assuredly not one of the worst, nor one of the best live-action remakes from Disney’s vault, it’s a lackluster letdown whose potential for greatness goes unrealized

Disney’s beloved 1992 animated musical about a young thief and the campy, wish-fulfilling buddy he finds in a magic lamp has always seemed like a bad fit for a flesh-and-blood update. Its zippy charms—from the mile-a-minute celebrity impressions of Robin Williams’ Genie to the scenery changes that accompany Alan Menken, Tim Rice, and Howard Ashman’s brain-spongingly hummable songs—belong to the elastically flat world of cel animation, with an occasional, pioneering digital assist. But the nostalgia-mongers and intellectual-property necromancers of the House Of Mouse have made a business out of ignoring the bog-standard life lessons of their own movies—in this case, the one about how riches and power can’t buy happiness.

It’s no big secret that Disney envisioned Mulan as a means of conquering the lucrative Chinese market, the second-biggest box office in the world and poised to soon be the first. The absence of Mushu, for instance, isn’t exactly an inspired creative decision so much as a strategic one—the silly dragon sidekick, voiced by Eddie Murphy in the original, did not play well with Chinese audiences back in 1998. The animated Mulan is a deeply stereotypical depiction of China—an American’s understanding of the country—so the live-action remake necessarily takes a different approach. At the very least, the outcome is visually stunning, with otherworldly production design and lush costumes that recall the vivid, fantastical style of Chinese wuxia films.

Lavish and impersonal, Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella turns the classic fairytale into a 19th century Ruritanian romance, complete with fictional kingdoms, behind-the-throne intrigues, and a scheming court advisor for a villain. Clothed in a colorful mishmash of historical fashions and scored to sweeping strings, the movie is like an antique cut-crystal vase: gorgeous, fragile, empty. The stepsisters dress like Regency lollipops, the stepmother rocks a high-collar Edwardian get-up in envy green, and Cinderella arrives at the ball in what looks to be the world’s most elegant quinceañera dress; it’s easy to get swept up in the prettiness of it all, and hard to give a damn whether it might end one minute or the next.

Released at the height of what’s come to be known as the Disney Renaissance, the 1991 Beauty And The Beast wasn’t just a commercial and critical highpoint for its animation house (remember, it was the first animated movie to score a Best Picture nomination). It was also a state-of-the-art technological marvel. In a way, that’s true of the new version, too. From the moment Belle (Emma Watson) steps out onto cobblestone to complain in song about her provincial life, it’s clear that no expense has been spared in recreating all the familiar details, from her modest blue-on-white ensemble to the rows of shops and homes in her quaint French village. The costumes look like costumes, the sets look like sets, but it’s still something to gawk at: a meticulously crafted amusement-park kingdom, a Fantasyland ride built from the blueprint of old animation cels.

The Little Mermaid remake isn’t without its charms. It’s a colorful undersea adventure that allows for enough winking artificiality that it can sometimes feel like an overly elaborate stage production instead of an overly expensive tribute to nostalgia through a photorealistic lens. This should by all rights be a star-making turn for Halle Bailey, but that doesn’t overcome the film’s failure to find an artistically valid reason for its own existence. Its most iconic moments are borrowed and copied wholesale, serving as little more than a reminder of simpler days watching clamshell VHS tapes released from the Disney Vault. Maybe that’s enough for some people. But maybe, like Ariel, we should want more.

The first notable live-action remake from Disney predates the current trend by 20 years, and maybe that’s what makes it stand out as one of the best. The impetus for making it seems less like a cynical cash grab and more like someone suddenly wondering one day what it would be like to see Glenn Close play Cruella De Vil, and then proceeding to make that happen. Every other creative decision springs forth from that single, genius starting point. Coming out at a time when visual effects weren’t as sophisticated as they are today, it also features more live animal actors (and real puppies!) rather than lifeless CGI ones. There is some digital augmentation going on here, to be sure, but it isn’t as heavily reliant on it as, say, the recent Lady and the Tramp. While it’s not a perfect movie by any stretch, it at least manages to add something new to the original version and feels like it has some blood in its veins.

Special effects take pride of place in Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli stories. A paean to the harmony of nature created almost entirely in digital space, without a single real animal, landscape, or tree, Favreau’s fantasy is hampered by a talent-show moppet Mowgli (newcomer Neel Sethi) and by difficulties of translation; produced as a remake of Disney’s popular animated musical, it often struggles to make a place of its own amid the callbacks. (“The Bare Necessities,” the earlier film’s best-known song, gets a tossed-off sequence.) Yet as a display of effects know-how, it has undeniable allure. Talking animals have never looked so good, which is a bigger feat than it sounds.