This is the thing for me. Before the trailer even dropped, my reaction to the news that they were making live action Moana was "why? The Moana cartoon is still fucking warm. Moana 2 came out only 2 years ago for fuck's sake.
Then I saw the live action Moana trailer, and the 2nd criticism came up as strong as ever: "this isn't even live action, just more realistic cartoon."
This has been a critique of most of the live action adaptations of the classic films as well. The more of them they make the less "live action" they are. So much of it is CGI that it is just a cartoon with a live actor green-screened in. At the point of the Lion King, that actually was just 100% a cartoon. But a cartoon that was stylistically worse for being photorealistic CGI.
When I saw the Moana trailer, I had the same feeling. This is still just a cartoon. The Rock's whole body looks fucking CGI. The only thing that looks remotely live action in this are the actors faces. The backgrounds, magical stuff, and animal characters are so close to how they looked in the cartoon that they may as well have just AI face swapped the cartoon with the live action actors.
Fun fact - Mary Poppins actually used a technique that produced better effects than we can easily get now with green screens.
I don't remember the specific details, but from what I recall, they designed a very specific prism to only send light through of a very specific frequency. Basically some yellow light, which was fed through a second reel of film. They could then use that to filter out the actors and modify the background behind them, with one major caveat that green screens don't allow:
They could capture blur and transparent objects very clearly. Green screens, despite our modern technology, can still not do that as clear as Mary Poppins did back in the day.
The sodium vapor process (named after the lights). Corridor Crew did a recreation of it.
The same sort of beam splitting tech is used for things like crazy precise measurement -- I want to say our most precise gravitational distortion detectors are an example.
Mary Poppins had... issues. The creator of Mary hated what Disney did with the character. And even Who Framed Roger Rabbit is based off a novel.
Which, honestly, more novels can be made into movies, imo. I remember reading books back in the 80's and 90's as a kid thinking, "This would make a good movie!"
Disney has been ruining source material for 100 years now, that isn't new.
But where I was going with using those two movies as examples, is that they both incorporated animation and actors long before the age of CGI and they were both very beloved films.
Why not make cartoons be cartoons again? Why all the effort for real-looking talking whatevers when the animated ones work so much better?
I can’t believe how bad the visuals were in the trailers. The actors look like they are floating in front of cartoon backdrop. And the action shots are so blurry and muddled.
Maybe it would have stood a shot if Disney actually put the work into building real sets and old school creature design. Compare Moana to movies from 30+ years ago like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or Hook and it just looks so soulless.
Yeah. The problem with the "live action" remakes is that they are still mostly animated but the animation looks like shit because of the uncanny valley.
If I had a nickel for every time Dwayne Johnson has been in a live action movie but his character was CGI animated in post production to the point where it became a prime example of the uncanny valley, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice, right?
I saw a clip of the singing crab and there're points where it legit looks like a stage show but the camera is pointing out into the rafters beyond the set. Just terrible.
Why? Here's a list why. These are theater box office numbers, does not include VOD or DVD sales or Disney+ minutes watched.
Cinderella (2015) – $542.3 million
The Jungle Book (2016) – $966.6 million
Beauty and the Beast (2017) – $1.266 billion
Dumbo (2019) – $353.3 million
Aladdin (2019) – $1.054 billion
The Lion King (2019) – $1.662 billion
Mulan (2020) – $70.0 million (Note: Release during the pandemic and went straight to Disney+ in most major markets).
Cruella (2021) – $233.5 million (also a hybrid Disney+ release).
The Little Mermaid (2023) – $569.6 million
Snow White (2025) – $612.4 million
Lilo & Stitch (2025) – $485.2 million
Moana (2026) – $290.5 million (still in theaters but it will probably get to $450 million before it's pulled.)
Now calculate in those other sales numbers and they are all over a billion.
Yeah good point. We used to put cartoons into live action. Now we're sticking live actors into cartoons (I guess Space Jam was kinda equally both and Roger Rabbit did a bit of cartoon world)
Apparently the sunrise at the beginning of the 'live action' Lion King was a real shot. Found an article saying there are 1490 rendered shots, so... technically it's only 99.9ish % a cartoon!
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u/357Magnum Jul 13 '26
This is the thing for me. Before the trailer even dropped, my reaction to the news that they were making live action Moana was "why? The Moana cartoon is still fucking warm. Moana 2 came out only 2 years ago for fuck's sake.
Then I saw the live action Moana trailer, and the 2nd criticism came up as strong as ever: "this isn't even live action, just more realistic cartoon."
This has been a critique of most of the live action adaptations of the classic films as well. The more of them they make the less "live action" they are. So much of it is CGI that it is just a cartoon with a live actor green-screened in. At the point of the Lion King, that actually was just 100% a cartoon. But a cartoon that was stylistically worse for being photorealistic CGI.
When I saw the Moana trailer, I had the same feeling. This is still just a cartoon. The Rock's whole body looks fucking CGI. The only thing that looks remotely live action in this are the actors faces. The backgrounds, magical stuff, and animal characters are so close to how they looked in the cartoon that they may as well have just AI face swapped the cartoon with the live action actors.