No, it’s not live-action, but the remake of “The Lion King,” directed by Jon Favreau, is truly hyper-realistic. It’s so damn realistic that if you didn’t know the lengths the filmmaker went to in creating the film, you might very well think that it was filmed with real animals. However, according to one of the VFX people behind the scenes, a ton of work went into creating the remake, and the mandate to make everything “hyper-real” meant that one classic scene from the animated film had to be greatly changed.
Yahoo spoke to VFX Supervisor Elliot Newman about “The Lion King” and why the almost shot-for-shot remake of the film is missing one of the most iconic shots.
READ MORE: ‘Lion King’ Shatters The July Record On Its Way To A $531 Million Total [Box Office]
The scene in question, from the animated film, features Simba looking to the clouds and seeing his father, Mufasa speaking to him, as a sort of cloud apparition. And according to Newman, that sort of supernatural thing just wasn’t going to make the cut in the new realistic version.
“A lot of that had to do with the style of the movie,” Newman said. “It would have been jarring if Mufasa was suddenly standing up there in the sky, because everything else is so hyper-real. Jon was always saying that he didn’t want it to be a literal thing… and draw the perfect outline of Mufasa in the clouds. He wanted it to have some build-up and drama, so it would feel really epic.”
It’s a bit funny to even mention that anything in Disney’s “The Lion King” remake had to be changed because it wasn’t “hyper-real” enough. Keep in mind, this is the story of a talking lion fighting to be king of the realm against another talking lion with the help of other talking animals while singing. But alas, a face in the clouds is just going way too far.
Kidding aside, the fact that a film based on a cartoon about talking animals had such a large team of animators and crew amped on making it realistic is a bit silly and might point to the biggest (and most legitimate) criticism of the 2019 remake — “Why does it need to exist?” Most people would consider the original ‘Lion King’ animated film to be damn-near perfect in its storytelling (though it is most likely a rip-off of a Japanese franchise, which itself was influenced by “Hamlet,” but I digress).
So, why do you go to all this trouble to change what was perfectly fine to something inferior? Well, the obvious answer is money. But when you see how much effort went into making the clouds not look like Mufasa, it’s a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with the remake. It’s a tech demo hidden behind an unnecessary film.
“That sequence was quite hard to animate, because it was a really complex cloud and electrical simulations that took many hours to calculate and render,” said Newman. “We had to figure out how to give Jon the benefit of working in a kind of sketch mode without him having to use his imagination too much. Because what would happen is that we’d block out a whole scene [as a sketch], and he’d go ‘I can’t really tell, but sure,’ and then we’d present the final render and he’d say, ‘I don’t like it.’ We ended up with a hybrid approach where we [put] layers of cloud simulation on top of an animated space, so we’d have some control over animating it by hand if we needed to modify it. When we presented it to Jon in that format, he could at least see how the clouds were moving and make decisions about the timing.”
Just reading that is exhausting. Let alone actually doing it. But yeah, it’s better to go to all that trouble instead of just making a damn lion appear in the clouds, huh?
“The Lion King” has already surpassed $1 billion and is continuing to make Disney even more powerful in theaters now.