5 Animated Films We’d Love To See Remade In Live Action (& 5 We Didn’t Need)
There are always animated films to be remade. That seems to be Disney’s current motto. If they aren’t churning out new Star Wars characters or thinking of a way to give their characters TV series’, they’re remaking animated classics. There are quite a few that we’ve seen and didn’t exactly like, but there are still a few that haven’t had the same treatment just yet.
We’ve put together a list of the five animated films (not necessarily Disney) we didn’t need making into live-action and five that we might actually be interested in seeing one day.
10 Didn’t Need: The Lion King
When The Lion King first came out all those years ago, no one thought ‘we need a version of this where the animals look more real’. When the film was announced, everyone continued to think, ‘we really don’t need this’. When everyone saw the film, the overwhelming consensus was ‘we didn’t need that’.
Despite being completely unnecessary and unwanted, it instantly worked its way towards becoming one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Which likely means Disney instantly stopped caring about the mixed reviews.
9 We’d Love To See: Ice Age
While the first Ice Age film might be a great comedy full of great characters, it does lack in its animation. The look is a little dodgy, to say the least, with a few errors here and there and a primarily white landscape that doesn’t really do the setting justice. The idea of seeing Manny, Sid and Diego in their ‘live-action’ forms might not be overly exciting, but the prospect of seeing the grand, glacial world they live in (alongside some dinosaurs) has the potential to be a visual feast perfect for a huge cinema screen.
8 Didn’t Need: Jungle Book
The remake of The Jungle Book was met with a much more positive response than The Lion King, and for good reason. It was a brilliant film that might even top its animated predecessor. But we didn’t need it.
It gets rid of some of the racist undertones of the original, sure, but no one was ever clambering for the film to be given another lease of life. One of the most unfortunate things about the remake is that it pretty much did away with the music that made the original so infectious.
7 We’d Love To See: Bolt
Bolt didn’t really work. Putting Miley Cyrus opposite John Travolta was a particularly interesting, quite hard to comprehend move, but the whole animated spy-dog thing just wasn’t pulled off in the way it could have been. In a live-action film, we’d see real people (which makes a lot more sense for a spy film), and maybe even a real dog? The dog part makes things a little iffy, but if there is one thing that is sure to draw in an audience, it's involving a really cute, really real dog.
6 Didn’t Need: Dumbo
Tim Burton’s adaptation of Dumbo was basically despised universally. He lost the spirit of the original film within seconds and calling it live-action is pretty misleading when your lead role is played by an animated flying elephant.
Even though the cast was great and the film was pretty visually pleasing, there was no real need to replace the trippy originality of the old animation. Disney may be trying to reintroduce these films to a younger audience, but through this reintroduction, they seem to be losing fans both new and old.
5 We’d Love To See: The Iron Giant
The Iron Giant is a unique one-off. Its animation style (with direction from Brad Bird, one of the masterminds behind the animation of The Simpsons) was praised, alongside its genuinely heartfelt storyline and strangely warm voiceover from Vin Diesel.
In a way, it would be nice to see the film left alone to marvel in its legacy, with no sequels or adaptions potentially interfering with its perfection. However, it’s hard not to want to see what the titular character might look like (beyond its brief cameo in Ready Player One).
4 Didn’t Need: Sonic The Hedgehog
The strange film adaptation of Sonic The Hedgehog has already been pushed back once due to the backlash over his terrible design, and things haven’t really improved. James Marsden and Jim Carrey lead the half-animated, half-live action film, and even though it isn’t out yet, we can say with absolute certainty that a film simply isn’t necessary. The appeal of the Sonic series is the player’s ability to control the uber-quick hedgehog as he propels himself around a video game landscape. We don’t need to see him moving around with no input from us, it just isn’t as satisfying.
3 We’d Love To See: Tangled
One of the major problems with animating a Disney film is that almost every single one has an anthropomorphic companion who would really struggle both in terms of cuteness and realism to make it into the real world successfully. In Tangled, Rapunzel has a little lizard thing, but he doesn’t actually speak.
He is also really small and not overly relevant, so his presence would be easy to figure out. On top of that, the beautiful landscape of the film would be great to see reimagined in real life, and it would be cool to see those long, luscious locks flowing from her tower without assistance from animation.
2 Didn’t Need: Alice In Wonderland
Alice In Wonderland was already perfect. The surrealism of Lewis Carrol’s book was truly unique, capturing the nuances of every character and giving a sense of wonder and creepy beauty to each location Alice ends up in. They also took the liberty of combining the original book with its sequel. The Johnny Depp remake lacked all of the originality of the first film and took a much more cash-grabbing approach by separating itself into two films very unnecessarily.
1 We’d Love To See: Mulan
Maybe this entry to the list is cheating slightly because very soon, we are going to see a live-action remake of Mulan. This is great because it can help fix the questionable portrayals of race and gender found in the animated original. Hopefully. It seems that the remake is going to leave behind Eddie Murphy’s fantastic Mushu, but this may be for the best if they’re looking to create a gritty, realistic action film. This could be the most necessary Disney remake we’ve been treated to yet.