Mostly B-team animators too - most of the ones considered the best at Disney were on Pocahontas. This film allowed a lot of younger talent at Disney to step up.
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The absolutely majestic beauty of THE LION KING (mobile warning/thread contains ALL the gifs)
- Thread starter jett
- Start date
The Lion King made me want to become an animator. I never became one but such was its power. The naturalistic scenes (like the scene with the tropical rain) or the scenes in the intro with the animals was the most breath taking thing I had seen as a child - and it still gives me the chills.
Just did a Rewatch myself in preparation for the remake, and its just as I remember it. Scene to Scene, Dialogue to Dialogue, its all just so wholly ingrained in my brain. Its beautiful, its funny, and it just gets my emotions going. As an adult I still remember watching this for the first time, one of my first memories of watching something at home, and the father son relationship is just as moving.
If you were lucky as me and had the same relationship as I did with my dad, you cannot hold back the tears with Simba seeing his father as this Superman idol, and then being reminded that the ideal died long ago as you started realizing as a young adult that the passage of time will mean he will get old, he will get weaker, and that as a human he does have faults. And watching it now, seeing my father become weaker and older, it gets harder to watch the movie because I keep seeing myself and my dad in Simba and Mufasa, we had the same mentor/buddy strict when he needed to he synergy, same noogies, same everything. God damn it this movie.
If you were lucky as me and had the same relationship as I did with my dad, you cannot hold back the tears with Simba seeing his father as this Superman idol, and then being reminded that the ideal died long ago as you started realizing as a young adult that the passage of time will mean he will get old, he will get weaker, and that as a human he does have faults. And watching it now, seeing my father become weaker and older, it gets harder to watch the movie because I keep seeing myself and my dad in Simba and Mufasa, we had the same mentor/buddy strict when he needed to he synergy, same noogies, same everything. God damn it this movie.
Some of the reviews for the new movie mentioned how the CGI characters can't make a wide range of facial expressions because the animators are trying to keep things as realistic as possible. That alone kinda kills the movie for me. Their was so much joy and terror on Simba's face throughout the old movie.
Seeing all these gorgeous gifs leaves me worried of the inevitable "live action" remake craze affecting other great animated works, like Miyzaki's films and Pixar.
Imagine fucking Spirited Away in live action. Fuck!
Imagine fucking Spirited Away in live action. Fuck!
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What?
It's still an amazing looking sequence today. And it's unbelievable how well the CGI has held up, it just mixes in perfectly with the hand-painted scenery and the hand-animated characters.
I try not to get so wound up in talking about cartoons as a grown ass adult but dang, the opening of the Lion King is a legitimately overwhelming experience to me. I can't see it without getting flush in the face, a bit short of breath, and misty-eyed. It's that majestic.
I'm not interested in the remakes for any of these films, but I try to tell myself that its just like it was then, skilled masters at their crafts trying to push the envelopes of what is possible, and it makes me feel less skeevy about it all.
I'm not interested in the remakes for any of these films, but I try to tell myself that its just like it was then, skilled masters at their crafts trying to push the envelopes of what is possible, and it makes me feel less skeevy about it all.
Like I said, Can You Feel The Love Tonight is sung during the afternoon.
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What the fuck?! Holy shit, they took whole scenes straight from the other film. Like straight 1:1 copy in some parts. I imagine there was a plagiarism suit or something because that's pretty blatant.
Definitely a beautiful film. Wish it did more for me. It's one of the few Disney renaissance films that I don't feel any personal connection to, and I was the prime age for such a thing back in 1994.
Nope. They figured they had no chance suing Disney.
What would Disney's defence be when a court is shown the exact same imagery in the older film that they lifted? You do this for a university film project and you will be failed or worse. But somehow being a big corporation trumps all that? They can't even argue the inspired argument considering how lazy of a copy it is.
Full disclosure, my college animation instructor worked at Disney throughout the Renaissance starting with the Fox and the Hound and was assigned to The Lion King.
Jeffrey Katzenberg threw the "B-team" under the bus SO hard because he was fully convinced Pocahontas was going to be their Oscar-winning golden child, and, yeah, Lion King was just a silly talking animal movie. They had the "B-team" animators on it with their key talent on Pocahontas, they poached the best designers and song writers for their big Oscar-tempting song numbers. Katzenberg told the crew "If this makes $45 million in its lifetime, I'll be pleased." He had rock-bottom expectations for it.
And my instructor told us their team had a fire lit under them to prove they weren't the second-rate animators their boss said they were. Their "silly animal movie" is a cultural landmark now (Kimba controversy notwithstanding) and Pocahontas is considered on of Disney's lesser films.
Yeah, one of them said how Zazu talks by just flapping his beak open and closed with dead eyes, which looks and moves like a real bird but in this context looks like they dubbed over some nature footage.
And to think Disney had their B team make this because they were convinced Pocahontas was gonna be their big movie that year.....