TMW #36: Disney remakes ranked, cartoon cats and a dual-role quiz

Flow, Dumbo, De Niro...

Greetings screen-culture vultures,

And welcome to another Tuesday Wingman dispatch, packed with movie musings. Today we’ve got pieces pegged to the week’s biggest releases. Firstly, ahead of the new live-action Snow White, a tiered guide to the good, the bad and the middling of Disney remakes.

Next up, in honour of Flow we got an im-paw-ssioned thinkpiece on why cats are top of the pets in the annals of animal animation. And finally we have a quiz on dual roles, tied to double-De Niro thriller The Alto Knights. That’s The Alto Knights. Sorry, did we say that twice?

Paying subscribers will find both cats and Bobs below the paywall. Not a subscriber? Sign up and you’ll be treated to the full cine-smorgasboard every Tuesday and Friday. Plus you’ll be supporting independent film writing - something you can also do with your likes, shares and restacks.

See you on Friday for reviews of Snow White, Flow and The Alto Knights, plus our usual rack of recommendations and trailers. Till then…

Matthew (Matt and Jordan)

Disney Live-Action Adaptations: The Good, the Bad and the Meh

Wingman sorts the beauties from the beasts….

The live-action (or at least photorealistic) remakes of Disney animated classics continue to be big business in the film industry. This week, Snow White is hitting cinemas, just a couple of months before Lilo & Stitch lands. And others are getting in on the act, with DreamWorks’ do-over of How to Train Your Dragon also releasing this summer. While the movies are frequently big business, flops aren’t unseen, and the films rarely manage to supplant the original in the public consciousness.

Here, we’re looking at the great, middling and risible attempts so far, to work out what makes some sing, while others have us wishing they never existed. We’re sticking to the films that feel like direct adaptations of animated originals, rather than new takes on the source material, or invented sequels/prequels.

TOP TIER

Pete and Elliot in Pete’s Dragon (credit: (c) 2016 Disney Enterprises inc. All Rights Reserved.)

Films included: 101 Dalmatians (1996), Maleficent (2014), Cinderella (2015), Pete’s Dragon (2015)*

The best of the live-action adaptations have an awareness that you need to ‘adapt’ to the new medium. In the case of Maleficent, it’s a fairly radical reframing of a well-known story. Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella sticks closely to the template, but gives it room to breathe in live-action, fleshing out the human characters over Cinders’ rodent friends. David Lowery sensibly keeps the bare essentials of Pete’s Dragon (boy meets beast) to deliver a contemporary-ish take with Amblin vibes.

They’re often built around big movie-star performances, such as Glenn Close going for black-and-white villainy as Cruella, and Angelina Jolie vamping it up as Sleeping Beauty’s evil fairy. Cate Blanchett is reliably great as a new take on the wicked stepmother trope, and even Robert Redford adds craggy charisma to Pete’s Dragon.

While there must be some nods to the animated movies - be it songs, visuals, Easter eggs - for this whole enterprise to work, the best feel familiar, but not identical. 101 Dalmatians, written by John Hughes, grafts Home Alone-esque humiliation onto the finale, but at least it feels like a movie (and revisited in the present day, its use of real animal actors adds a charm often lacking now). (Matt Maytum)

*Yes, we’re aware that the OG Pete’s Dragon wasn’t a fully animated film, but as Lowery’s movie is the very best of this bunch we couldn’t not include it.

MID TIER

Mufasa and Simba in The Lion King (credit: Disney/YouTube)

Films included: The Jungle Book (2016), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Aladdin (2019), The Lion King (2019), Mulan (2020), Peter Pan & Wendy (2023), The Little Mermaid (2023)

Much of the product churned out in the animated remake space falls into this category. Largely, these are entertaining in the moment but have the shelf-life of candyfloss. The reason that they are largely enjoyable and at least superficially successful is that in most cases they’re working off bullet-proof templates, and they also happen to push the nostalgia buttons effectively. They fulfil the brief of showing what some of your favourite childhood films would ‘look like’ if they were real, while reminding you what great stories they were. But it’s frequently an exercise of limited scope.

Great songs will do a lot of the heavy lifting (Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, The Little Mermaid), so they’re always fun to see reprised, even if they - like the films themselves - inevitably won’t replace the originals in the long run. The mid-tier, decent adaps are also often a showcase for the Disney entertainment machine’s technical capabilities - if The Lion King simply worked better in more expressive ‘hand-drawn’ 2D, there was no denying the visual effects in Jon Favreau’s update were truly remarkable, enough alone to warrant a cinema trip.

The most successful (and the most lucrative) adhere almost unwaveringly to the established plot (though somehow often manage to pump up the runtimes considerably). These aren’t the most artistically fulfilling, but films like Mulan show the risks involved when you veer too far from the source: it’s a solid enough adventure, conceived on a grand scale, but without any songs or Mushu the dragon, it was a much harder sell. (Matt Maytum)

BAD TIER

Pinocchio (credit: Courtesy of Disney Enterprises, Inc.)

Films included: Alice in Wonderland (2010), Dumbo (2019), Lady and the Tramp (2019), Pinocchio (2022)

There’s no shortage of films that prove the Disney live-action-remake project is a creatively bereft boondoggle, but 2010’s Alice in Wonderland is the original sin. Not only did the film’s mammoth success ($1bn at the global box office) derail Tim Burton’s career, it set the Mouse House off on the most cynical, IP-mining exercise of the exulted studio’s storied history. Wonderland wasn’t well received at the time – particularly the over-reliance on sub-par VFX – and it’s aged about as well as warm milk. Burton further disgraced himself with his live-action take on Dumbo – a film so poor even the perpetually brilliant Michael Keaton said he ‘sucked’ in it.

Any remake of a classic is going to have a tough time living up to the original – particularly films as cherished as Disney’s back catalogue – but the problem is compounded in this case by the fact that the original, tightly plotted ‘toons typically clock in at less than 90 minutes, while the remakes are pushing, and in some cases exceeding the two-hour mark. Has there been a single example of new material adding anything truly worthwhile? Er… no.

Robert Zemeckis’ dire Pinocchio is a prime offender for padding (original: 88 mins, remake: 105 mins), shoehorning in pointless side characters and instantly forgettable new songs, but inexplicably jettisoning one of the more iconic movie endings of the 20th Century. With the notable exception of the two David Lowery movies and Mulan, Disney’s live-action remakes have been slavishly faithful to the visuals and basic story beats of their forebears. Such is the case with the redundant Lady and the Tramp remake, which swaps the endlessly charming hand-drawn animation of the 1955 original for uncanny CG canines which look about as huggable as taxidermy.

If the very worst of Disney’s live-action remakes prove anything it’s that, however impressive they might be technically, rarely does the artistry match up to the hand-drawn originals. The live-action remake trend is a novelty that has run its course. (Jordan Farley)

DISNEY REMAKES IN NUMBERS

Average Rotten Tomatoes score of all considered films: 60% (highest: 94% for The Jungle Book, lowest: 27% for Pinocchio)

Most featured actors: Helena Bonham Carter has appeared three times (The Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, Fairy Godmother in Cinderella). Hayley Atwell, Luke Evans, Billy Magnussen, Ewan McGregor and Emma Thompson all have two roles in Disney live-action remakes.

Longest period between the original film and its live-action remake: 88 years between Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Snow White (2025).

Shortest period between the original film and its live-action remake: 22 years between Mulan (1998) and Mulan (2020). Soon to be overtaken by the mere decade between Moana (2016) and Moana (2026).

Biggest running-time increase: The Little Mermaid (2023) is 52 minutes longer than the 83-minute original. Dumbo has the biggest percentage increase: a whopping 75%.

Average running-time increase: The remakes are 28 minutes longer on average (Pete’s Dragon is the only remake to run shorter, by 26 minutes).

Disney remakes to gross more than $1bn: Alice in Wonderland ($1.025bn), Aladdin ($1.098bn), Beauty and the Beast ($1.356bn), The Lion King ($1.662bn).