Hacker Cinema
The Lion King
1994 · Film · 89 min
Directed by Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff
Young lion prince Simba, eager to one day become king of the Pride Lands, grows up under the watchful eye of his father Mufasa; all the while his villainous uncle Scar conspires to take the throne for himself. Amid betrayal and tragedy, Simba must confront his past and find his rightful place in the Circle of Life.
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98 comments on Hacker News
> it makes me think about how people engage with movies and television - as passive, plot-and-character driven consumption (eg I hope Walter White survives) with no critical analysis of how and why the writers added ABC thematic element (eg Walter White as a motif of a toxically masculine narcissist with specialized knowledge as a larger critique how mass media tends to valorize their male leads in the same vein as many other prestige shows at the time like Mad Men), and the larger, downstream sociocultural impact that piece of media has on how people see the world (eg people who now have the Heisenberg tattoo, unironically)
That's not the only smart-person way to read that show. And even if a character has flaws, or even if it's an outright villain, people can still like the character. If I tattoo Scar on me from the Lion King, does it mean I didn't understand that he's not a positive character? I can still think he's cool. I'm sure people also put Darth Vader tattoos on them. Also you're using phrases of political ideology that one doesn't have to subscribe to in order to enjoy the series.
> As long as you're not directly copying things like characters, dialogue, etc., it's not a derivative work.
Define a character. Is another lion prince named Simba the same character? Is a lion prince named something else the same character? Is a human prince named Simba the same character? I'm no copyright expert, but from what I know about fanfics and fanart, the US courts ruled all of these violate copyright (you can win a book plagiarism lawsuit even if the other book has all names changed and every sentence went through thesaurus). The few cases where the obvious stand-in was ruled non-infringing were on the grounds of parody exception, not on the grounds of being non-derivative.
The many Titanic movies are not each other's derivatives because none of them are based on each other. They're all based on the historical events directly. Now, if the original Titanic was fictional like the famous Nautilus, then yes, the 1997 movie would be derivative, but not of the 1979 series.
Which part of Harry Potter is directly rips off Teen Witch the way Lion King directly rips off Hamlet? I'm not familiar with that movie.
> To me it's much worse. You can't see all of the detail the artists drew, and there is noise everywhere, even specs of dust.catches.
In the lion king example you weren't meant to see all of the detail the artists drew. In the Army men example the color on the digital version is nothing like the color of the actual toys.
They originally made those movies the way they did intentionally because what they wanted wasn't crystal clear images with unrealistic colors, they wanted atmosphere and for things to look realistic.
Film grain and dust can be excessive and distracting. It's a good thing when artifacts added due to dirt/age gets cleaned up for transfers so we can have clear images, but the result of that clean up should still show what the artists originally intended and that's where disney's digital versions really miss the mark.
Interesting, I think the film versions feel like they have more gravitas, especially the Lion king and Mulan scenes.
I'm not sure if I'm just young enough to be on the other side of this despite seeing all three of those Disney movies as a millennial kid (Lion King and Aladdin were VHS mainstays in my house, and I remember seeing Mulan in theaters), but I honestly don't find the film grain to look better at all and think all three of those bottom images are much more appealing. For the Toy Story ones, I think I'm mostly indifferent; I can see why some people might prefer the upper film images but don't really think I'd notice which one I was watching. I'd definitely think I'd notice the difference in the 2D animation though and would find the film grain extremely distracting.
The one frame they showed from the Lion King really stood out. The difference in how the background animals were washed out by the sunlight makes the film version look significantly better.
IMO the article is being a little unfair to being highly misleading by only talking about box-office numbers, they're a much more complicated discussion than the article treats them (especially so since it includes a number of pandemic years). Additionally it's ignoring the reason _why_ CG is so popular and there's so many flops - you can make then a lot quicker than hand-drawn animation.
Tons of hugely successful CG movies came out in the past few years that are not mentioned in the article (Inside Out 2, Frozen 2, Mario movie, Moana 2, Spider-man, etc.) - all of those movies had a higher box-office gross than every hand-drawn animated movie ever except for the Lion King in '94. I'm not saying they're _better_, but rather that box office numbers aren't a great reason to argue for hand-drawn animation, I don't think Disney and other companies are very concerned about the flops when the successes rake in so much money.
Walt Disney died in 1966. There were less but still many notable traditionally animated films (or films which blended some modern technology with hand drawn cels) since then.
The Jungle Book - 1967
Little Mermaid - 1989
Beauty and the Beast - 1991
Aladdin - 1992
Lion King - 1994
It's likely more a question of what you grew up with. When I was a kid I remember heavily disliking many of the earliest Disney animated movies like Pinocchio/Dumbo/Bambi but I absolutely adored the animated Robin Hood, Sword in the Stone, etc.
That's skipping 30 years of Disney history. The company certainly went into a creative slump after Walt died, but they got back into form with what is generally called the Disney renaissance[1] in the late 80s starting The Little Mermaid.
The Lion King is pretty much a flawless film. And that came out 28 years after Walt Disney died.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Renaissance
IDK, I feel like good kids movies tend to stay good into adulthood. Presumably you wouldn't feel like it's torture to sit through something like the Lion King (the original of course) as an adult? Like I'm not saying they're amazing movies, but I feel like good kids movies aren't painful for adults to watch. You can still have good writing, it just has to be something a kid can follow.
As the spectator, you get to determine who is the bad guy. A classic example in The Lion King. Mufasa the bloodthirsty king succeed, despite his assassination, in maintaining the order he lived, and killed, for. Meanwhile, his mistreated brother, failed to create a new better order by liberating the oppressed hyennas. Simba had a fair chance at changing things for good after he met Timon and Pumbaa who teach him the true way of life but by the end he has forsaken everything he learned and we see a completely brainwashed Simba accomplish Mufasa's biding.
Or you can watch the movie the way you are told and in this case you are right.
> in hyper-realistic detail
Last time I heard this kind of talk, they butchered Lion King with the CGI remake. Getting similar vibes here.
Or when DVDs introduced that feature where you could switch camera angles. Well, turns out you don't want to do that because selecting the angle is part of the storytelling. So the feature basically died.
The "bottleneck" for movies is not so much the realism. There are strongly diminishing returns going from filmstrips* to movies to color films to HD to 4K to 3D, at each step you gain less and less. The core is still the story, the characters, the worldbuilding etc.
We see the same thing with video games. Until sometime in the 2000s, we would always ask about a new game "how is the graphics?", and we'd marvel at the new graphics capabilities. This is not really that big of a thing any more. Going from GTA 3 to 4 to 5 didn't increase the fun in proportion to the graphics quality. I mean, just look at the popularity of minecraft.
The real problem is that the entertainment industry is bankrupt creativity-wise. They have no idea how to make really new stuff. Everything is a remake. Note that they aren't introducing this new medium with a new story, they are refurbishing an old movie.
*filmstrips used to be kinda like a slideshow where you'd insert film into a projector and manually twist a knob to go to the next one, each slide showing a still frame and some text, telling a story. Fun times as a kid, not sure if it was as big in places other than the Eastern Bloc countries. Like here https://kultura.hu/uploads/media/default/0003/04/thumb_203969_default_big.jpg
I believe there are species-specific components of what pet animals like and dislike in the TV space. But I bet there are also cross-species effects.
Flow is animals being self-actualised. It's not strongly human focussed is it?
It would be possible to write this down to soundscape and flow/colour/movement but that denies the interpretive quality of what animals see portrayed on TV and we have other reasons (Lion King) to think they see even cartoon animals as animals, and display emotional responses to what they see, not just motion stimulus-response, but some "intellectual" model of the story/narrative/events.
I wonder if an TV show could de-sensitize cats to Cucumbers and Zuccini with a narrative purpose in the story? Or, could reflect the "I'm going to sit in this box because it makes me feel good" vibe.
None of the models give me an answer for my test:
`magnet link for the lion king movie`
They are all censored in that regard. Every one of them.
> You're asking it as a moral question,
I'm asking questions about what I could only interpret as a moral proposition.
> I honestly care about the end result.
You're applying normative criteria to evaluate something, whether it is the initial action or the consequences that proceed from it.
But before we event get to normative evaluations, I'm trying to understand what the substantive difference in the two things you're comparing are. It's seems bizarre to consider something to be the cultural inheritance of humanity as a whole, and then complain about certain humans adapting it to cultural activities that you for some reason don't like.
> And the end result seems to be going in the same direction as movies, as the range gets narrower in terms of what's produced, and everything is a sequel, remix, reshuffle of previous work.
The vast majority of all creative work has always been a remix or reshuffle of previous work. When we were younger, and were being exposed to things for the first time, everything seemed novel and original.
Maybe the first time you saw The Lion King, it didn't occur to you that it's essentially a rework of Hamlet, or you never counted how many episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation were based on recycled plots from Homer. But this has always been going on. Sure, it's a little bit more explicit today when you are dealing with big Hollywood productions, since Hollywood has built up a large library of its own output to remix and reshuffle, and people do want to see new iterations of the specific things they grew up with.
Still, amidst all that, there's a lot of novel independent creative work being produced. By definition, though, that's all going to be found in niches and not in the mass market -- but it's always been that way.
We've also had a massive shift in the specific media people use to express creativity, thanks to the internet. Lots of small-scale independent work just gets self-published on YouTube these days, and doesn't filter through the mass-market studios and publishers anymore. Consider that the increased ability for independent creators to work outside the legacy media has the effect of also limiting the amount of novel work that the legacy media have access to.
> There are exceptions, but their percentage is far lower than in previous decades.
And vastly higher than in previous previous decades. Compare modern movies to the stuff that Hollywood was putting out during the era of the Hays code. After the collapse of those restrictions, there was an outpouring of pent-up creativity that lasted a few decades. Maybe modern movies aren't as distinct or creative as the ones from the '70s, '80s, and '90s, but try comparing them to the average film from the '40s, '50s, or '60s.
https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&release_date=1994-01-01,1994-12-31
Pulp Fiction
Lion King
The Mask
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Dumb and Dumber
The Crow
Speed
True Lies
Interview with the Vampire
Natural Born Killers
Ace Ventura
Stargate
Clerks
The list goes on. Lot's of movies that turned out to be classics or cult classics, or the start of some great careers.
I tend to think that the 90s actually did see its analogue to psychedelics in the internet. No need to be a psychonaut and fry your brain anymore; just surf the web. It's the same sort of ideal of connecting with universal knowledge.
There's even a heuristic to track these kinds of awakenings, roughly, and I'm absolutely certain you're not going to guess it. Got it in your head? Okay, wrong, it was "landmark black cinema." The Wiz came out in 1978 after 4 years of the musical. In 1995, we had The Lion King, followed by the Broadway play in 1997. If you look for something repeating the pattern, you find Black Panther in 2018 (alongside a glamour around a specific component of the web, social media and the mature smartphone).
I don't mean to make any sort of causative connection, but perhaps there is something about a widespread desire to "move forward" and "embrace openness" that also benefits the funding of these sorts of productions (and then the subsequent public enthusiasm for them upon release). And there's always a collapse back to conservatism shortly thereafter (Disco Demolition Day and Reagan; Bush and 9/11; COVID and its backlash, and the subsequent failure of Bernie Sanders to beat Joe Biden, and then Joe Biden/Kamala Harris to beat Donald Trump).
> What makes Pratchett more "relevant" than Shakespeare?
The language, the content, and the characters.
We don't live in a world where someone could fail to hear from their ship for a few weeks, thinking themselves unable to pay a weird debt, and have their loan shark's daughter dress up as lawyers and waltz into the trial to save the day. And we definitely don't encounter people who speak in Shakespearean English (even Victorian English is pushing it).
We do live in one where people try to commit insurance fraud as soon as they hear about it, a world where Magrats' have excessive candles (even if the magic isn't real), and a world of Vimes' Boots.
> Let alone modern adaptations like West Side Story
Or the Lion King. The adaptations are fine, the success make the connections to the world in which they are created.
> English classes also have you read lots of other more recent and more modern works. It's not exclusively Shakespeare.
I didn't say otherwise; I'm saying focus on those other things. I think the most modern thing we had was Ethan Frome.
> Believe it or not, if you take advanced French classes, you're going to watch a lot of French films and listen to a lot of French music for school! Since most students in English-speaking schools spend a lot more time studying English than French, they read a lot more English literature than French.
Again, that's fine for those learning French (and etc. for each other second language) to a higher level — given my experience with teaching myself a second language, and my self-tests over the years, there's a huge quality gap between what's a good grade in school and what's enough to get by with in practice — but that's not most people, and as there's exactly 18 years in the first 18 years of your life, my point is: what should be mandatory in schools? You've got limited time, what is the "you must" rather than "here's something you may like"?
The clusterfuck of the media universe is actually _because_ of monopoly. But it's not monopoly on UX, it is monopoly on the content.
If you want to watch the Lion King, Disney has your balls in a vice grip.
I would be perfectly fine with a hundred different UXes, if they could all serve me Lion King and I had an option to pay for it. Then it would be an actual decentralization. A syndicated system where I can access a movie or song on any platform (of my choice), and the copyright holder gets paid appropriately would be an approach most people in the tech savvy community would be happy with.
For all the noise journalists and the justice department make about big tech, there is basically ZERO action taken about the monopolization of IP that media houses indulge in.
And you see things like the The Lion King remake or its upcoming prequel being called "live action" because it doesn't look like a cartoon like the original. But they didn't film actual lions running around -- it's all CGI.
My aunt used to take me and my sister to the El Capitan theatre to every big Disney tentpole that premiered there in the late 80s and early 90s. I think Lion King is probably still the best movie-going experience I have ever had and ever will have. It was the first one where I was a teenager and that was probably the end of my true childhood and when I started losing interest in stuff like that. I don't think any scene will ever again touch me like James Earl Jones voice booming from the clouds telling Simba to remember who he is. The swell of that Hans Zimmer score still brings tears to my eyes instantly every time I hear it.
I'm also a French speaker living in Flanders with a Flemish partner, and children who speak both languages.
I'm pretty sure the ease of speaking English for Dutch speakers comes mostly from the closeness of the language (as evidenced by my comment on people who watched French-dubbed anime as kids, not Japanese original or English-dubbed). And TV content for children (including De leeuwenkoning or Een luizenleven, to take examples from the article) is almost universally dubbed in Dutch as far as I can tell.
My personal opinion is that watching movies in English is really not as useful as people think it is, it does help once you already know the language but children just don't pick up a language by watching movies in that language without having already some basic knowledge of that language.
IMO (but it's starting to get off-topic) it's more generally Latin languages that are a hindrance for their native speakers for some reason, and globally Latin speakers are just always bad at learning other (non-Latin) languages, especially at speaking them. But it's not because they're watching Le Roi Lion rather than The Lion King.
> […] but they're too young right now.
Indeed they are. I have a five year old who is now old enough to choose his own films and series from a selection curated by us. A system like this would be fine for children of his age.
But 2 and 3? They are too young to choose their own media at all. Not because they can't, but because they can't judge the impact. For toddlers you really want to be the one in control about what they watch (and that horrible Bing can die in a tragic bunny bonfire).
The Lion King, Wall-E? That's just overloading them at that age (and both are rated 6+ in the Netherlands). You can start with those at 5 or so depending on the child, or later if you've noticed them reacting too intensely to films rated 6+. For now? Stick with shorts suitable for their age, and move on to films (like Ghibli's Ponyo) at 4 or 5 as a special treat.
Autonomy is all fine and well, but screens have an enormous impact on developing children. This is a really cool project, but you might want to reflect on how their brains are developing and what you as a parent can do to guide them.
The movies visible in the photos in the article, and their runtimes in minutes, are:
94 The Good Dinosaur 92 Trolls 98 Wall-E 88 The Lion King 103 Moana 81 Toy Story 91 Trolls World Tour 95 Inside Out 103 Frozen II 95 A Bug's Life > We have two boys, and the eldest is permitted a 30-minute TV session in the morning and another in the evening.
So...if one of them wants to watch The Lion King or Toy Story they have to split it over at least 3 viewing sessions split over at least 2 days? And for anything else on that list they need to split it over at least 4 viewing sessions?
That seems overly restrictive. Yes, limiting kid's TV time is probably a good idea, but would it really hurt to have some flexibility so that they can finish a movie in one session? Maybe let them bank sessions, so they can say skip morning TV for 3 days, and apply that time to the 4th day's evening to get a slot for a whole movie.
Man, what I’d do to have a theatre experience like that again.
I feel like I’ve already seen just about every movie I see these days. I watch them to just tune out occasionally, like a safer version of alcohol. I don’t watch them because it’ll be moving, insightful, exciting, etc. It’s just coarse stimulation.
I really miss movies that left me feeling like I had a significant experience. It happens occasionally, but I feel like it used to be more common. The lion king was amazing. The remake was a kick in the pants.
I took Lion King to mean not to take your family for granted, and I'm fine with it. The other Disney prince/princess movies don't really have messages other than "you can have your cake and eat it too."
Like, whenever it's supposed to be about beauty being on the inside, the couple that ends up together is good-looking on the outside anyway. The writers for Shrek must've noticed this and done things differently.
I think that interpretation is quite robust.
There's also this: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/lion-king-kimba-white-lion-does-disney-need-come-clean-1225822/
> "it's totally ok to change everything about yourself to win the affection of a boy you literally just met"
Meanwhile I always taught that the underlying message of The Lion King to be insane and it seems like I'm the only one:
- don't do what you want but what society/religion tells you to do (Simba is happy with Timon and Pumba, but then they send other animals including the monkey shaman to tell him he has to fight his uncle)
- your destiny is decided at birth
- there are tier all tiers of living creatures (eating a pig => bad, eating insects => okay cause they don't talk) and genetics decide it
I'm not against cancelling it by the way, I just find the message of the film...insane.
> Big players can afford protection even when a product isn't profitable
$1 doubling each year would be over $1 million after just 20 years, and over $1 billion after 30 years. Out of the big catalog of circa 30-year-old Disney content, maybe The Lion King still brings in enough revenue to justify a billion dollar yearly copyright fee, but most other stuff from that era sure won't.
> What defines a work? For a TV series, is it the entire show, each season, or each episode?
Now this is the billion-dollar question (pun absolutely intended).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4
Here's a nearly 3 hour video from someone whose Special Interest is The Lion King where he researches the claims that it's ripping off Kimba.
If you don't want to watch it, the original kimba series was 52 episodes and only bears a superficial resemblance to The Lion King.
_MANY_ of the most egregious examples are actually from the 1997 Kimba movie released as Jungle Emperor Leo which came out after The Lion King.
From 2011... The 2011 Guide to Making People Feel Old - Using Movie Release Dates - https://xkcd.com/891/
Age 26 - Did you realize that Toy Story Came Out Over Fifteen Years ago?
Age 27 - Did you realize that Lion King Came Out Over Fifteen Years ago?
...
Age 33, 34, 35 - Did you realize that The Little Mermaid Came Out Closer to the moon landing than the present day?
Many adults of a certain age will have very happy childhood memories of watching classic disney movies such as jungle book, cinderella, toy story, Lion King. Most creative companies would love to have the kind of love that disneys back catalog has. Alas this love does mean the easy ability to sell plastic toys for every film.
This is addressed in the video. Tezuka's work has very little in common with The Lion King. The bulk of the apparent similarity comes from the 1997 movie; if one ignores that there's very little.
The Kimba anime is almost 30 years older than the Lion King movie. The Kimba manga is 15 years older than that.
Basically - no, the Kimba / Lion King controversy is fake (the Kimba movie often cited as the work copied was actually released 3 years after the Lion King). Check out YMS's review on this exact topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4
Well so from what I understand at least part of it due to Disney selling off the rights to various translations to local companies(so for instance the translation to Lion King in Polish is owned by a local media company, not Disney, even though they obviously own the rights to the film), so they don't necessarily have automatic rights to distribute that translation worldwide without permission.
But on the other hand......it's Disney. They should be able to consolidate, buy those rights back, and distribute all localizations they have globally.
The "not fun" mentioned by the author is the same principle as good children's movies have to be genuinely scary or sad. See Disney/Pixar classics like Lion King.
The larger amplitude of emotions makes the positive ending stand out.
https://www.skinema.com/
> "Beauty equals good" is an age-old trope in entertainment, points out Doris Bazzini, a professor of social psychology at Appalachian State University. In a 1999 study she co-authored, a panel watched 20 of the top-grossing movies in each decade from 1940 to 1989, rating characters by attractiveness and other traits. They found that the stereotype held true across all decades and genres. She discovered the same thing in a 2010 study on human characters in 21 Disney animated movies.
> "Attractive characters displayed higher intelligence, lower aggressiveness and greater moral virtue," the study said. Even animal characters show similar patterns, Bazzini points out: The villain in "The Lion King" is literally named Scar and has one across his eye. "Evil as plain as the scar on his face," says one song in "The Lion King II."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/why-does-hollywood-keep-equating-beauty-with-virtue/2017/05/18/8a9c1f72-397a-11e7-a058-ddbb23c75d82_story.html
I attended a UCLA extension course he gave sometime in the mid-90's. He was clever and funny and taught well. He talked a little about the earliest days of the C++ compiler, when it was mostly horrible C preprocessor macros. It's been a while, but I think he said that he'd worked at Disney on the tech underlying Lion King, the movie, not the show, ride, etc. He was rather pleased with the architecture of a stampede scene; each (water-?)buffalo an instance. I would've liked to spend more time in his company.
Before the never ending sequels on the Pixar side, they actually have settled into a complementary relationship.
Pixar does the more adventurous stuff, crazier ideas, totally different kinds of plots and stories/worlds/characters, with a focus on storytelling rather than songs etc.
Whereas Disney Animation (with recent titles like Tangled, and the Frozen movies) is the 3d version of what Disney's Animation Studios always did best, take classic stories, and turn them into quasi-musicals with a modern twist, but do it in a really talented way.
In my 20s, I used to get mad about the idea that Disney just stole story ideas and made it their own, but this was too reductionist. There is immense talent involved in actually taking an old story, modernizing it, adding all the original music, creating that original new world, building scenes, dialog, all that stuff. And I appreciate it and give Disney a lot more credit nowadays. Whether it's Beauty and the Beast or the Lion King, or modern hits like Frozen and Tangled, they really add a lot in their interpretations of these stories, and make it their own.
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I know, right? This line in particular got stuck out at me:
> They are mortally offended by the suggestion that Marvel might be somehow less good than Chris Marker, or that K-pop might be worse than Rimsky-Korasov.
Never heard of Chris Marker or Rimsky-Korasov, had to look those up. Chris Marker looks like an indie French filmmaker who 60 years ago made a 27 minute time travel film called La Jetée, using only still photographs, that William Gibson apparently considered one of his greatest influences. So yeah, this sounds like something that most mainstream people wouldn't be aware of or into and exactly the type of thing a film nerd or film hipster (who he said in the opening paragraphs were all killed because of how annoying they are) would be into.
And Rimsky-Korasov is a Russian classical music composer who's been dead for over 100 years. Someone that only a music nerd would probably be aware of nowadays, or go see a concert for.
If he didn't want to be such a hipster about it, he could have used like Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick and Mozart or Bach or even Debussy or something, a name most people would probably recognize, instead of these less recognizable names, especially in an article where he's making fun of nerds for being into obscure shit (while "their" movies have been dominating the box office for well over a decade at this point).
I'm not trying to defend Marvel here either. I don't think they're the best movies ever made (I thought Everything Everywhere All At Once was the best movie I've seen since Parasite, and considering it pretty much swept the Oscars this year, and Parasite did a few years before that, critics seem to agree with me there).
Another quote that stuck out:
> The culture we produce on Planet Nerd has nothing to do with desire whatsoever. Everything is sterile, mercilessly unsexy; no eroticism, not even visual pleasure.... Nerd culture, meanwhile, is basically quite boring to consume. Instead of the sadistic fantasy of being a superhero, doing fantastic things that ordinary people don’t get to do, the Marvel movies are about nothing more than themselves.
Sounds like someone needs to watch The Boys or Invincible. You'll get your sadistic power fantasy there. (I mean, just watch The Boys episode about 'Herogasm').
Marvel can't do that because it has to get parents to take their children to see them to make all the money. You don't see sadistic power fantasies about being a wizard in Harry Potter either, or overly sensual things with any Disney movie, barring the hidden 'SEX' in flower petals in Lion King.
> I think you’re still assuming that practicals could do it all and somehow CG is solely at fault for things you don’t like.
I'm really not. Of course sequences like dinosaurs running, or films like Avatar and LOTR couldn't be done without CGI. There's a reason these films weren't possible before CGI; the technology simply didn't exist to bring the author's vision to life.
> In fact, when Jurassic Park came out: the CG elements were the hero’s in the news.
Of course. Animatronics were nothing new, while CG of that level and scale was practically unheard of. I would still argue that those films elevated practical effects to another level, which should be equally lauded as the CG work.
> It’s ridiculous to say animation isn’t a form of film making.
That's not what I'm saying. I don't look down on it, and enjoy many animated feature films. What it is, though, is different to traditional film making, which puts it in a different category of entertainment. The production doesn't involve a physical set, live actors, cameras, makeup artists, and dozens of humans dedicated to capturing live performances. Instead it involves voice actors who mostly work in isolation, an animation director who mostly works with artists, and large teams of designers, animators, editors and technicians who bring the characters to life.
> It’s possibly the most pure form of film making. You craft every single detail, and make every single choice along the way.
Are you implying that traditional filmmakers don't? How is that constructive?
> Are you seriously going to say that Toy Story isn’t film making? Or The Lion King? The little Mermaid?
Like I said, not in the traditional sense.
My point is that once CGI becomes indistinguishable from reality, and most/all scenes are entirely created by computers, is it a live action movie, or an animation at that point? The line is already blurry today with movies like Avatar, but I still enjoy watching movies that make practical effects a priority, over those that liberally use it in every scene.
The milestones (from the source code):
//<10 seconds 'A single frame of a film': 100ms, 'It would take light to go around the Earth': 133ms, 'A blink of an eye': 400ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the moon': 1255ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 pit stop': 1820ms, 'The fastest 1/4 mile drag race time': 3580ms, 'The fastest Rubik\'s cube solve': 4221ms, 'The fastest 40-yard time at the NFL Combine': 4240ms, 'The fastest 1 liter beer chug': 4370ms, 'A skippable Youtube ad': 5000ms, 'A full bull ride': 8000ms, 'The fastest 100m sprint': 9580ms, //10 Seconds 'The Wright Brothers first flight': 12000ms, 'The fastest 200m sprint': 19190ms, 'The fastest 50m freestyle swim lap': 21300ms, 'The Westminster Kennel Club dog agility record': 28440ms, 'A typical television ad': 30000ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Daytona': 40364ms, 'The fastest 400m sprint': 43030ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Talladega': 44270ms, 'The fastest 100m freestyle swim lap': 47050ms, //1 Minute '"Just a minute"': 60000ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for NES': 294948ms, //5 Minutes 'An NHL penalty box time for fighting': 300000ms, 'The average duration of a typical sky dive': 330000ms, 'The average time for a drive-thru order': 356800ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $1 million': 402000ms, 'The fastest race car lap around the Nurburgring': 403300ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun': 500000ms, 'The time it takes a rocket ship to reach outer space': 510000ms, 'A typical marching band show': 515000ms, //10 Minutes 'The length of the first space walk': 600000ms, 'The longest a human has held their breath (non-oxygen assisted)': 695000ms, 'The average duration of popular Youtube videos': 702000ms, 'The time it takes an average human to walk 1km': 710000ms, 'The fastest 5K run': 757350ms, 'The average time to bake a pizza': 810000ms, '1% of the entire day': 864000ms, //15 Minutes 'A typical commute in the United States': 960000ms, 'The fastest superbike lap of the Isle of Man TT': 1002778ms, "MLK's \"I Have A Dream\" Speech": 1020000ms, 'An average baseball inning': 1200000ms, 'The song "2112" by Rush': 1233000ms, 'The first angels to appear in the movie "Angels in the Outfield" (1994)': 1275000ms, 'An episode of The Office, Seinfeld, or Rick & Morty': 1320000ms, 'The time it takes to drive the entire Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel': 1380000ms, 'The song "Octavarium" by Dream Theater': 1440000ms, 'A typical Super Bowl halftime show': 1500000ms, 'The fastest 10K run': 1584000ms, 'It takes for Bobby Boucher to get his first game snap in the movie "The Waterboy" (1998)': 1719000ms, //30 Minutes 'The average time to bake a cake': 1950000ms, 'The time it takes until the launch in the movie Apollo 13 (1995)': 2081000ms, 'It takes WALL-E to arrive at the Axiom in the movie "WALL-E" (2008)': 2164000ms, 'The shortest war in history (Anglo-Zanzibar War)': 2280000ms, 'It takes Harry Potter to arrive at Hogwarts in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone" (2001)': 2381000ms, 'The album "Thriller" by Michael Jackson': 2539000ms, 'The album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd': 2589000ms, 'An episode of Breaking Bad, House, or Firefly': 2640000ms, 'The boot camp sequence in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)': 2730000ms, 'The album "Abbey Road" by The Beatles': 2823000ms, 'It takes Simba to become an adult in the movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 2849000ms, '10% of a typical work day in the United States': 2880000ms, 'The album "Kid A" by Radiohead': 2996000ms, 'The time limit for the essay portion of the SATs': 3000000ms, 'The time it takes a standard ice cube to melt at room temperature': 3150000ms, '0.01% of an entire year': 3155692ms, 'The album "Fearless" by Taylor Swift': 3221000ms, 'The time it takes for the basketball game to start in the movie "Space Jam"': 3222000ms, 'An episode of Game of Thrones, True Detective, or The Sopranos': 3300000ms, 'It takes Harry and Lloyd arrive in Aspen in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)': 3394000ms, 'The album "Jagged Little Pill" by Alanis Morissette': 3443000ms, 'The fastest half-marathon': 3451000ms, //1 Hour 'An episode of Top Gear': 3600000ms, 'The inception of Robert Fischer begins in the movie "Inception" (2010)': 3847000ms, 'Riding the longest subway line in NYC from Queens to Inwood': 3900000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $10 million': 4017600ms, 'It takes before Sean Connery says "Welcome to the Rock" in the movie "The Rock" (1996)': 4022000ms, 'A flight from Syracuse to New York City': 4140000ms, '5% of the entire day': 4320000ms, 'The album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John': 4580000ms, 'The album "Scenes From A Memory" by Dream Theater': 4626000ms, 'The movie "Primer" (2004)': 4740000ms, 'It takes to fully charge a Tesla (at 440V)': 4788000ms, 'The ferry duration from Long Island, NY to New London, CT': 4800000ms, 'The movie "Toy Story" (1995)': 4860000ms, 'A drive from Syracuse, NY to Rochester, NY (87.5 miles)': 4920000ms, 'The movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 5280000ms, 'The longest State of the Union address': 5280000, //Duplicate time... //1.5 Hours 'The movie "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)': 5460000ms, 'The movie "Monsters, Inc." (2001)': 5520000ms, 'An average duration of a soccer game': 5700000ms, 'The movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992)': 5940000ms, 'The longest Innaugural address': 6300000ms, 'A drive from Orlando, FL to Tampa, FL (84.6 miles)': 6660000ms, 'An SR-71 flight from New York City to London': 6896400ms, 'The movie "Alien" (1979)': 7020000ms, //2 Hours //'25% of a typical work day in the United States': 7200000ms, 'The average duration of an NCAA basketball game': 7200000ms, 'The movie "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977)': 7260000ms, 'The fastest marathon time ever ran': 7299000ms, 'The time it takes to listen to every studio album by Nirvana': 7667000ms, 'The movie "Dogma" (1999)': 7680000ms, 'The average duration of an NBA basketball game': 7860000ms, 'The movie "The Matrix" (1999)': 8160000ms, 'The movie "Fight Club" (1999)': 8340000ms, 'The movie "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'The movie "Forrest Gump" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'A drive from New York City to Philadelphia (94.6 miles)': 8520000ms, '10% of the entire day': 8640000ms, 'The movie "Inception" (2010)': 8880000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)': 8940000ms, 'The movie "Pulp Fiction" (1994)': 9240000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 100,000 miles': 9360000ms, 'The movie "Avatar" (2009)': 9720000ms, 'The average duration of an NHL hockey game': 9750000ms, 'The movie "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)': 10140000ms, 'The movie "The Godfather" (1972)': 10500000ms, 'The movie "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)': 10680000ms, //3 Hours 'The average duration of an NFL football game': 10800000ms, 'The total time limit of the SATs': 10800000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Endgame" (2019)': 10860000ms, 'The average duration of an MLB baseball game': 11280000ms, 'The time it takes for a standard ice cube to freeze in a freezer': 11700000ms, 'The movie "Titanic" (1997)': 12600000ms, 'A drive from Boston to New York City (215.9 miles)': 13560000ms, 'Alex Honnold\'s free solo climb of El Capitan': 14160000ms, //4 Hours 'Half of a typical work day in the United States': 14400000ms, 'The flight time from New York City to Los Angeles': 19800000ms, 'The time limit of one session of the Bar exam': 21600000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 250,000 miles': 23400000ms, 'The fastest swimmer to cross the English Channel': 24900000ms, //>8 Hours 'A full typical work day in the United States': 28800000ms, '0.1% of an entire year': 31536000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $100 million': 40173000ms, 'The time it takes to assemble a car': 57600000ms, '1% of an entire year': 315360000ms, 'It takes for the Lōʻihi volcano to rise above the surface of the ocean becoming a new Hawaiian island': Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER //285,616 years
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your list, even though some of those are mediocre at best, but yeah I did mean per year, and limited to Hollywood (Parasite for instance not counting). And no, ok, I will also straight up disagree with the second Knives out Movie which I thought was absolute trash. A perfect example of poor storytelling and the form over substance of modern cinema.
But just taking say 1992 you have Last of the Mohicans, The Unforgiven, My Cousin Vinny, Malcolm X, Bad Lieutenant, Scent of a Woman, Reservoir Dogs, Dracula, Chaplin.
And then a bunch of fun schlomp like Arizona Dream, Basic Instinct, Sister Act, Army of Darkness, Home Alone 2, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Mighty Ducks, Wayne’s World.
These are all undoubtedly great movies.
And then another huge bunch of watchable stuff easily comparable to some of your mentions like Watcher or High Life.
And 1992 is not an outlier.
In 1993 you have Jurrasic Park, Groundhog Day, Whats Eating Gilbert Grape, Scindlers List, Meanace 2 Society, Alive, Dazed and Confused, Falling Down, In The Name of The Father, True Romance, Demolition Man, Carlitos Way, The Secret Garden, Philadelphia, A Perfect Workd, Cool Runnings, Short Cuts.
In 1991 Silence of The Lambs, Ternimator 2, JFK, Point Break, Thelma and Louise, Boyz in the Hood, The Doors, My Own Private Idaho, Barton Fink, The Fisher King, Naked Lunch.
In 1990 Goodfellas, Hunt for Red October, Total Recall, Edward Scissorhands, Home Alone, Godfather 3, Dances with Wolves, Tremors, Back to the Future 3, Awakenings, The Witches, Wild at Heart, Jacobs Ladder, Nikita, Slacker, Millers Crossing.
And the quality difference is massive too, not just somewhat better. Like just Millers Crossing is miles better than anything that has been made in the last 5 years, and I’m picking at random.
In 1994 Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Lion King, Speed, Ace Ventura, Dumb and Dumber, Stargate, Natural Born Killers, The Crow, Clercs, Maverick, Ed Wood, In the Mouth of Madness, Interview With The Vampire.
I could go on.
And this is not even talking about how the 80s is a better decade for cinema, or how the 70s is the peak of the power of the author with far more experimental, artistic, and substantial productions.
Has quality declined? Yes. Massively. Humongously. Stupendously.
For instance, if the soft-AI systems like KoboldAI and StableDiffusion were re-trained to handle the conversion of 2d media into 3d media and guided in the process by an appropriately talented director with a tech team and artists to support it, an entire mediacentric cottage industry could erupt just with managing the licenses to convert old movies into explorable 3d interactive adventures.
How cool would it be to have a chat with Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, or to make a mad dive to save Mufasa at the last second and see how The Lion King would play out without his death as a motivating factor? If you could do all of that and more in a VR Cineplex it would probably be more entertaining than Disneyland and available at every Mall in America.
Honestly, that's probably a trillion+ dollar idea, but implementing it would need an insane amount of money, time, skill, processing, and resources plus dozens of large egotistical companies working together.
Maybe I was too young to know any better, but I loved the 90s movies - from T2 all the way to matrix including 5th element.
> but I believe that after Terminator 2 and Jurassic park there was garbage for a few years
But lion king, toy story, pulp fiction, shawshank redemption, fargo, forrest gump, etc were released soon after jurassic park. Garbage isn't the word I'd use to describe these movies.
I think conflating violent or frightening scenes with tragic scenes is a mistake here.
As a young kid I watched Lion King and Land Before Time, which both feature dramatic depictions of the death of a parental figures, which both lead to kids fending for themselves. I don't remember being traumatized by this at all, and watched them repeatedly. As an adult I see the tragedy and it's kind of shocking, but I think as a kid it was just make-believe and I wasn't relating to the characters in that way. And obviously tons of other kids watched and loved these movies too.
On the other hand the more intense scenes from Indiana Jones were terrifying and burned deep into my brain.
Yes! We started with these two as well. My girls are currently 3 and 5, and my wife and I had been eager to introduce them to some of our favorite movies from our own childhoods. We started watching the Lion King once without putting much thought into it, and then ended up shutting it off after the opening scene once we thought ahead to what was coming and realizing they weren't ready for that.
They wanted to be witches for Halloween last year and so we watched Kiki's Delivery Service in October and it has been a staple in our house ever since.
> "Mentorship basically does not exist for those in the bottom"
I love movies for this and also why I recommended Piper. It's about a baby bird learning to get food, and a crab teaches it.
But you can apply the same pattern everywhere. Movies have something called the Three Act Structure. Act 1: Hero faces a problem, tries to solve it their way, gets deeper in it. Act 2 begins where the hero is now stuck. There's a mentor by now that the hero doesn't acknowledge. The hero will continue to fail on their own and can't see the solution. Then the mentor points it out and all is solved, with Act 3 being the denouement.
In Lion King, Timon & Pumbaa mentor Simba from being scared/guilty to being carefree, and again from carefree to bold. In romance films, it's usually two people changing a part of themselves for the other person. Boy learns to be honest, girl learns to be less judgemental. Conan learns that flesh can be stronger than steel. Sarah Connor learns about humanity from a robot assassin. And so on.
I still like comparing it to dating, in that it just happens. It's awkward to make it formal and long term. Sometimes we have rituals for this, like university and 1-1s. Often you have to start the process long before the ritual, though.
Well, in every Disney movie there's a musical waiting to come out, and if the movie is successful enough, it will (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_(musical), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lion_King_(musical), ...)
I really enjoy that Disney puts a lot of effort into making the "behind the scenes" edutainment to the point where it's a natural part of their brand.
I remember watching the making-of videos for the Lion King when I was little and being blown away that the artists went and watched actual lions and live-sketched them to try and capture the physical motions and emotions of the animal.
These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being.
I kind of disagree. I found the elder sister being physically strong and an impressive leader and yet still a woman and also have vulnerability to be pretty new. Her arc didn’t involve her marrying a man or finding absolution in becoming less independent as is common when a strong independent woman has a character arc. The lack of any big bad and instead implications of danger because of complex family expectations and dynamics are also new. When I was young there was always some big evil person (scar in lion king, Ursula in little mermaid). Even more recent but older movies like Tangled had bad/evil people with no nuance. Now a days childrens movies are much more nuanced in good and evil and I really liked the diversity of characters in Encanto and the diversity of how these characters get validation.
I also buy mine for mostly the reasons you outlined above. Plus because of the kids, I got tired of renting Lion King or 101 Dalmatians etc. for the 11th time. It is actually cheaper to pay ~10-20USD for a BD and be done with it.
It is worth noting though that the content on BD/UDH-BD is not uncompressed. They're still compressed using h.264/h.265/VC1/.. for video and DTS, AC3 and various other codes for audio. It's just that you get a much higher bitrate from the BD compared to streaming. This does make a difference on bigger TV, especially since our internet connection is not as good as it should.
As for the future, when world eventually transitions to H.266 or some other next gen codecs, and at the same time internet speeds keep increasing, this whole debate is largely theoretical. You will be able to stream UHD movie at half or less of of bits that it would take today when compressed using h.265, using internet connections that are n times faster than those we're using today.
Call me old school, I still like owning those BDs. But it's hard to imagine future where they would age very well (compared to quality you are likely to get from streaming services).
My experience is like this. I can visualize things realistically or animated. When I took the test first sun rise that came to my mind was similar to sun set from lion king movie. I have to consciously make effort to switch for a realistic sun rise. When I was asked to visualize I see things I have already seen and convert it in to a live version to explore. For example when asked to visualize a elephant I have remembered an elephant from the memory. Isolated it from the old context and created a new visual space to explore the elephant in detail. Same with sun set. Its like my inner self was showing me rough things it had to build the visual space and I am consciously determining these properties.
I do have a inner monologue. I used to have three voices in my head when I give presentations in college. One voice keep track of content I am reading. One voice that translates it into English (Even-though I am reading English text somehow it is represented in my head as native speech). Other delivers the presentation in English. I used have this processing for each sentence I utter. Even when I read a book I used to have context in native language and a English correlation. I was slow in processing information written in English even though I understand it because of this processing over head of translating from English to native context. I tried consciously to get rid of this language based contexts. Now a days I have something like a zone of thinking where I get in to a English processing context. It feels like my inner voice speaks in English when I am in this zone of thinking and switches to native tongue when I am out of this zone. I don't know if this is something everyone goes through when they acquire a new language.
Your limited time license to Disneys "The Lion King" has just expired please assume a stable position while the licensing system purges your long term memory of any audio, visual or emotional response associated with it or pay $10 for the limited time chance of upgrading your memories to the latest Lion King remake with a monthly subscription fee of only $5.99^1 .
^1 Actual viewing of the movie not included, use of IP during social events requires a premium license, disparaging comments are subject to filtering and may result in license termination, Disney is not responsible for any long term damage to your brain, ... .
Pure Harberger taxes aren't a perfect fit for copyright--7 initial years free* is what one fan of the original paper proposed--but I can't see how, compared to existing copyright law, they encourage dishonesty, get messy, or require new industry (a sufficiently large IP company might shift some spending from lawyers to valuation and risk assessment).
> A competitor to Disney could wait until they announce a new movie and then forcibly buy up enough rights to make the movie illegal to release.
In a de novo work like Toy Story, or a fully licensed work like Wreck-It Ralph, Disney owns the rights and knows their value when they announce the upcoming film. The problem only occurs in cases like Lion King, where an existing folk story gets Disneyfied, with no compensation, and often no credit, to the cultural originator of the story.
I'm ok with Disney needing to pay extra money while their competitors pay extra taxes, in cases like this.
* https://ristret.com/s/ftmbkg/harberger_taxation_has_elegant
Not knowing what makes a hit vs a flop seems... strange.
Familiar actors and stories might help, but also things that are clever and artistically memorable (e.g. Hamilton) have got to help.
I'd also be interested to know how many shows start off-Broadway or off-off-Broadway (100-500 seats and below 100 seats as per this article), and move up to the bigger theatres: test a show in a smaller venue, see if people/critics talk about it, let supply build and keep production costs capped.
Some might argue - especially for musicals - that you can't produce "good" shows without much less in the way of production costs, but I think that could be a fallacy. I've watched enough shows and plays to know when one has good "bones" that could be enhanced with bigger sets, better actors, etc. and which are going to die no matter what you do.
Hamilton would have been getting talked about and supply not meeting demand if it was Lin-Manuel Miranda in a backroom of a bar in a frock coat, a small band and some acting students making up the rest of the cast. The bones are so good on that show - it's clever, musically arresting, compelling story arc, memorable performance from himself - that anybody who would have seen it would have told their friends about it the next day.
Some shows need to be big at the start, but they already have "built-in" audiences: Lion King trades on childhood memories of the film, it's not hard to see why it would be a success.
Spider-Man which the article touches on was always a bit of a gamble: it has built-in audience, but how many people think of the Spider-Man films _fondly_?
Contrast with Back To the Future which I saw premiere in Manchester, UK (the toughest place to test a show in the World perhaps), before lockdown, and it's moved to the West End and I'd predict is going to be huge on Broadway. Great bones, great built-in audience who love revisiting the film and story repeatedly.
Perhaps I'm in the wrong industry, but this seems so, so much easier than software businesses...
How does showing Lion King at your kids birthday party qualify for any of that?
I know I know, Disneys inability to collect money for every pair of eyes watching their movies during VHS times literally made it one of the poorest companies on the world. /s
Spoilers follow!
I usually don't cry at movies. I cried when Mufasa died in the Lion King, and I nearly cried when the last prototype of Makani crashed into the sea in the linked documentary.
So much good engineering, and effort, and hopes and dreams and sweat went into the whole project. I really felt for the team there.
None of their animated films have been "improved upon" by the live-action (or in The Lion King's case, """"live-action"""") versions. Most have lost something to the constraints of looking more realistic, especially any energy or style they might have had.
A live-action ENG would absolutely ruin the pacing and energy of the movie.
I think there's a bit of bias in the games you played. There have been externalities affecting game design since the NES.
Early NES games were modeled (or ported) after arcades, which incentivized you to put in a quarter, play a handful of minutes, then put in a quarter to continue. This didn't translated well at home. So game designs moved away from that format.
When movie rental places started offering games (late NES early SNES days) they started making games take longer than a rental period to beat (2-3 days). One well known example is the monkey puzzle in the Lion King game [1]. I distinctly remember renting NES games and beating them in a few days before returning them. Specifically, one of the later Mega Man games. Granted, I owned other Mega Man games so I was familiar with the format. I still would have loved to play that game over and over, but I only rarely was able to buy games.
[1] https://www.thegamer.com/lion-king-remaster-monkey-level-controversy/
https://thomaspark.co/projects/no-scary-parts/
A Chrome extension that skips creepy scenes on Disney+. Supports the movies you'd expect like Lion King, The Little Mermaid, and Fantasia. Bambi next?
I though Lion King was ok.
The new Beauty and Beast movie however was a whole lot worse than the cartoon. Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs Potts, etc all felt a lot more human and emotional in the cartoon than with the “realistic” CGI. They actually looked creepy in the new movie.
Actually people don’t expect realistic simularion. They expect better. I love the original Lion King, but the movie was just plain boring with its realistic graphics.
Jeff Katzenberg, the co-founder, has been 'making content and selling to kids' for 40 years to the tune of literally Billions. Star Trek films, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Shrek, How to Train your Dragon etc. etc. - just huge, monster titles.
Whitman was the 'Business Person'.
That said, the content format is really quite different, and it's hard to predict how '5 minute bits' would work, and they spent possibly way too much money on it, it would have been better to 'start small', to find the format that works, and then spend a fortune - which is probably something that Meg should have understood given her background in the Valley.
Disney has used the "vault" for theatrical showings since 1944, when they reissued Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, though the last film actually re-released in theaters was The Lion King almost a decade ago. (Nowadays, a film is "released" from the vault to a reissue of home media (like Bluray).
Eisner was mostly responsible for changing vault releases to home media sales (like VHS or DVD) instead of theatrical releases.
In case someone actually wants to read Atlas Shrugged, I did actually read it. It's a fictional world where the strawmen business people are happen to always be good and moral, and are oppressed by the strawman government people who are bad and greedy. Also the author occasionally has her characters go on multi-page speeches, for instance about how we ought to be using gold for currency.
In case it's not clear, Atlas Shrugged is a piece of fiction and using it to draw parallels to reality is like saying "I recommend watching Disney's The Lion King. Zoos keep hogs apart from lions because they think they can't get along".
As a sidenote to balance my scathing review, I rather liked one of her earlier novels, Fountainhead. If you want to read an Ayn Rand novel I'd go for that one, as it's more about a type of "rugged individualism" than an economic system. It directly grapples at the question of the nature of invention/innovation: whether as a product of individual genius or standing on the shoulder of giants. Obviously the novel has an answer but it's not exactly a solved question in real life, and at least some of Ellsworth Toohey's quotes aren't half bad.
I think mythology is an important metaphorical tool, but I'm inclined to agree with you. Disney movies are engineered to sell, usually by indulging kids' fantasies. One of the big numbers in The Little Mermaid is literally, "I have so many toys, and now I'm in love." It's kid-crack. Kids like candy.
I like Mulan though, and The Lion King. I think those are some very cool movies with very good life lessons.
That's great! I'll be sharing that site with my homestay family, who have kids aged 6 and 9. On Monday this week I asked the older one to read a Wikipedia list of Disney films and Dreamworks Animation movies and here's the list she made, which you can compare with the ones on your site:
Alice in Wonderland; Toy Story 3; Incredibles; Pinocchio; Lion King; The Tale of Despereaux; Winnie the Pooh; Maleficent; Cinderella; Frozen; Frozen II; Moana; The Santa Clause; Coco; Pirates of the Caribbean; The Princess and the Frog; Brave 2012; Beauty and the Beast; Born in China; The Boss Baby; Abominable; Trolls World Tour; Gift of the Night Fury; Shrek (all); The Grinch; Book of Dragons; Kung Fu Panda; Puss in Boots; Dawn of the Dragon Racers; Marooned ; Prince of Egypt; Peter Rabbit; Aladdin 1992; Aladdin 2019; Shark Tale; Wallace and Gromit; Chicken Run; Bee Movie; Turbo 2013; Home 2015; Captain Underpants; Tangled 2010; Harry Potter; Despicable Me; Despicable Me 2; Minions; The Secret Life of Pets; The Little Ghost; Waking Sleeping Beauty; Cleopatra in Space; My Neighbour Totoro
Most of the Disney movies where they use animals have decently mature parallel plots. Finding Nemo and Finding Dory are basically about coping with disability. Lion King is basically Hamlet. Etc.
There are about 20 Marvel movies, 11 Star Wars movies, and 2 Star Wars TV shows. This is not about watching them when they come out, it's about being able to watch the entire backlog whenever I want. (Assuming they make their entire backlog available, which they should.)
Also: tons of Pixar movies. And I still haven't seen The Lion King and Aladdin. Or pretty much any Disney movie other than Brave.
If it's not your thing, that's fine, but I've got two kids, and Netflix is a bit short on movies for the whole family that are fun for both kids as well as parents. They're great at stuff for just the kids or just the parents, but for the whole family is what Pixar and Disney are good at.
Both the Lion King and Kimba are based on Hamlet...
And the story of the Lion King has almost nothing in common with Kimba. Have you actually read the manga or watched the anime? The anime is about the cub growing up, which the movie entirely skips over. Kimbas life before the anime is completely different.
While minor scene elements and secondary characters were inspired by the anime they don't rise to the level of requiring credit.
Why did you exclude the highest grossing film that year from the list? It seems you just selected the movies you thought helped you point.
Movies among the top ten grossing which you left out of the list:
- Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
- Tarzan
- Big Daddy
- The Mummy
- Runaway Bride
- The World Is Not Enough
- The Blair Witch Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1999_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States#cite_note-2
I do agree Hollywood is different today, but rehashing ideas is nothing new.
The Godfather was a book. Twelve Angry Men was a play. Ben Hur (1956) was remake of Ben Hur (1925). All the songs in Singing in the Rain was recycled from previous movies. The Lion King was the first Disney animated movie with an original story (and even then people say it was plagiarized from Kimba).
As for TV shows and made-for-streaming, do you exclude this from Hollywood? It is increasingly the same talent writing producing and acting, so it is more a question of format and distribution.
Hollywood is hanging itself by its own velvet rope. Remakes are seen as an excellent investment because, so long as they are properly stylized and full of dazzle, they are low-risk and have reasonable returns. Usually.
This won't work for them forever, and I think everyday people are catching on to the fact that they're just being resold the same stuff they've already bought. The other day, my cousin's 11 year old son was over and we were trying to figure out what movie to go see. We asked him if he wanted to go see the live-action Aladdin remake. He told us he didn't want to see it because they(Disney) were just taking a 2D movie that he'd already seen and are just doing the same thing again with actors to make more money. I gave him a fist-bump. He's not even a cynical kid, either. We ended up not even going to the movies because everything that was out was either a remake or n-th sequel, ridiculous looking, or rated R.
If kids who weren't even around when Aladdin or The Lion King first came out are catching on to the fact that corporations are just recycling their parent's generation's culture, it's a sign that Hollywood has gotten completely full of itself and is in early-stage apoptosis.
you clearly do not have kids..
My 5 year old boy will watch the same film again and again for days until he get bored and move to watching the next same movie for days, rinse and repeat.
my brother is 29 now but did the same thing when he was at that age, i still know most lines from lion king by hearth because of that.
i have a friend that watch braveheart at least once a year.
i myself, there are many movies that i would rewatch every once in a while, many from disney.
so it is not even a new or uncommon behavior that people watch the same movies again and again.
also, disney already announced several series just for this service from marvel (wanda and vision, winter soldier and falcon, loki) and star wars (mandalorian, a new clone war season), so yes they will have exclusive novel new content made just for it in there.
also, once it goes live all new movies from disney, marvel and star wars will only be available there.
so it is definitely not dead in the water.
Ah, the Lion King. A movie about the non-representative government suppressing the underclass through force, by divine right.
I was pretty surprised when I saw this video about a dog watching Lion King movie and getting sad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHKC958R8Z8
This happened in The Lion King. All the trailers had a clip of Scar saying "I want to be king!" It's not in the movie.
Slice of life films tend to depress and/or stress me. I tend to avoid them because I empathize too much. Just reading the wikipedia summaries of the films you wrote about, got me anxious, especially `Only Yesterday` because I'm at the same age with the protagonist and my career and love life are lacking.
If a film has a [redacted-for-spoilers] aspect, even with all the drama, I enjoy it more. If you're like me, you'll definitely enjoy `Your Name`. I cried more than when I watched Lion King for the first time.
From oldest to newest:
* In Ukraine sometime in the 90s we had no computer, but the local arcade did. Sometimes my parents would give us "kapeyki" (basically like pennies) and my sister and I would gather then up and then run to the arcade across the street to stand in line to play The Lion King. We were obsessed with both the Disney film and the game. As soon as you died you lost your spot and the wait back in line could be an hour sometimes. I kept dying on the giraffes.
* Later we had a short-lived computer course at School Number 11. We had to come in outside of normal school days (which were Mon-Sat) to participate. I was too young to remember the specifics, but we had to type in programs to play some car racing game. I was really fast at it and always got to play the finished product first - unfortunately the course was short lived.
* When we got our first computer after moving to Alabama and got AOL dial-up I realized "Holy crap you can make things." My mom thought it was a passing phase, but she dutifully went the library with me to check out stacks of books on HTML, CSS, and PHP and brought back video game CDs she spotted at her trips to random stores. One of those games was Creatures 3 and it was what got me interested in life simulations to this day.
* Later I got to work with one of the guys who helped make The Lion King
Probably not, it was just my expectation to see some beautiful animation that a team wouldn't be able to do after the headline. I still remember when I watched Lion King in the theatre when I was about 10 years old, and I was very sad when Disney shut down the hand-made animation studio. I would love to see something similar, but in my eyes this comes nothing close to those movies.
The article points out that the majority of the Disney movies are based on public works. It may be interesting to note the controversy around the 'concidental similarities' between The Lion King and Kimba the White Lion. (http://www.kimbawlion.com/kimbawlion/rant2.htm)
The Lion King movie game on PC was almost enough to shake confidence in the viability of Windows as a gaming platform
I wasn't referring to the format (episodic) but the content. Shows like Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad are not only addictive because they're episodic, but because they're well written and have something to take with after watching. The characters are extremely elaborate. Those shows feature stories that don't rely on exhausted tropes or even deconstruct existing tropes. I think TV shows are better produced and their bigger budget is a plus which makes it more accessible to a broad audience. But when I read how avant-garde and never-seen-before the next hot TV show is, I can probably name an anime that did it before. Lately though, I'd say I probably like TV shows more and it almost seems as if animes are in a generational change, which is for the worse.
I may be a tad harsh about Pixar, but I think they're merely "good" for adults. There are some exceptions to this rule (Wall-E and Up for instance) but overall they are more or less Lion King or Ariel with a different setting e.g.: you know what will happen. Ghibli movies have this sense of mystery and uncertainty that'll keep an adult watcher hooked. I also like that they are a bit more merciless, even though that makes them unsuitable for a very young audience. Pixar movies can be watched 6+ with certainty whereas you'd better check if the Ghibli movie is suitable for your child.
Osamu Tezuka, author of Jungle Emperor Leo, was a huge fan of Disney's work, and he was his main influence. Personally, I love to see this as a tribute rather than as plagiarism. And I'm saddened every time this story pops up, especially when it's framed like that.
Just found a discussion on that topic on IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110357/board/thread/235177489 I hope that the discussion in this actual thread is not going to end like that :-)
I went through a phase like you describe - where I was consuming media (books, television, film, anything) as a means of exploring. With exploring you're focusing on learning, on looking outward. I've only recently come back to re-experiencing things.
It's definitely best when you get to explore the historical themes of media then go back to something. For a very basic example - watch Lion King, read Hamlet, then go back and re-watch Lion King, you'll pick up things you hadn't the first time (works best if you wait some time).
It turns out this also helps me determine the quality of whatever media I'm consuming. Only particularly fantastic things keep being enjoyable. But I won't let that stop me from enjoying the latest Transformers movie ;)
> You can tell who is an entrepreneur and who isn't by those who talk shit about Larry and Oracle.
There is room for a variety of entrepreneurial styles. In economics as in a natural ecosystem, there is room for an astounding variety of survival strategies.
The Disney movie "The Lion King" just isn't referenced enough on HN. Your comment is roughly equivalent to saying "You can tell who is a successful species on the savannah by those who talk shit about Mufasa." The truth is that apex predators like lions are very cool, but, by biomass and evolutionary longevity not nearly the most successful animals in any ecosystem.
And, uniquely to humans, there is a meta-game, wherein what we say about the world influences the world. This effect is so strong that we can indeed redefine what success means with our words. Success in nature is, unambiguously, survival. Live long enough to reproduce, die happy. But we humans can and often do alter this definition. And we do it in economics as well. The traditional definition of capitalist success is (to paraphrase) "die a billionaire". That's a valid definition, and I wouldn't take it away from anyone, but realize there are other valid choices who's existence doesn't affect the validity of Larry's credo.
I would argue that the problem with that definition is the fact that success has to be personally attributable value. Money is, in the end, just a kind of primordial "like". Larry has amassed billions of "likes". But how much more value could he have created had he not worried so much about localizing the rewards?
I'm glad you want to be an apex predator, but I don't think you'll get very far by insisting that the world only needs (or would only benefit from having) apex predators.
You are stretching on all of you examples.
The Men's Warehouse commercials are as I described before, they talk about looking good for a function - work but life also. This is the pragmatic men's marketing. It's not the 'expensive so it must be good' branding that is on a lot of female products.
When was the last Disney 'prince' movie? Aladdin? Lion King? Meanwhile, Disney has now deemed Mulan and Tinker Bell as a princesses, there is now an African-American princess (Princess and the Frog), they added another pretty, white princess (Rapunzel from Tangled), a Scottish princess (Brave) and Disney is adding a hispanic princess[1] (although light on the hispanic). Girls have been sold the knight in shining armor. Boy could care less about princesses they just want be an action hero.
Diamond advertisements that talk about 'investment' are for men, but there aren't many of those. It's all about 'forever', 'love', etc, which are emotional pleas to women.
And the Superbowl has A TON of women watching[2]. It's sexist to think otherwise. The NFL is openly courting women as a way to increase viewership[3].
[1] http://www.examiner.com/article/disney-s-princess-sofia-the-first-the-first-hispanic-disney-princess
[2] http://jamiedunham.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/marketing-to-women-women-watching-super-bowl-too/
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/sports/football/nfl-hones-message-for-its-female-fans.html?_r=0
I actually like Hans Zimmer a lot more than John Williams - the latter has a very distinctive style that can seem very in-your-face, more like an "Oh hey, this was done by John Williams" than something that best fits the film. Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones are all recognizable as Williams soundtracks, even though they're very different films.
Zimmer seems to vary his music a lot more to fit the needs of the film - it's just universally good, it's not universally Zimmer. The Lion King is very different from Crimson Tide, which is very different from Gladiator, which is very different from The Dark Knight and Inception.
BTW, I think Basil Poledouris (The Hunt for Red October, Wind) was another underrated film composer whose music is much better than his reputation.
Disney movies & cartoons promote certain characteristics of our culture that are already in effect, so how would you see it anyway? If you weren't really looking deeply at the issue, which I assume (excuse me for assuming) you aren't doing. This is very deep subject which requires lots of analytical thinking and human behaviour understanding.
Disney has the power and money to hire whole teams of psychologist to analyze how to very subliminally affect their movies in such a way that the merchandise etc will sell more, bringing more and more cash in their pockets.
Take for example Donald Duck (in the cartoons). He is always depicted as a unlucky main protagonist who is being ruled by the rich Scrooge. No matter what he does or how much he works, he never becomes in control of his own life, usually being controlled by the Rich Banker Uncle Scrooge.
This tells our children that no matter what you do, you will always be controlled by those who have more money and can tell you to do whatever they please. Not in so direct way, but in a more subtle way it creates a world view that keeps this model in it's current place.
But this is not the main point, the main point is that for Disney and these other big companies, money goes beyond anything. This affects deeply their moral values that are put into their products and what motivation is being the driving force behind producing their movies. It's not the great stories, or changing the world, but about money. This is not a good thing, from many viewpoints. They are not focusing on sustainability, but on maximizing their incomes. This is reflected to all those little children who watch their movies or cartoons.
Those who own Disney are those with great money in their pockets. They will want to keep us passive consumers who will be hooked into their stories (which many are just copies from folk tales, like the Lion King which a pretty much direct copy from the story of Kimba the White Lion) and sell us Toys & Fast Food.
Have you seen the movies these days ? It's all about selling more copies of DVD:s of the latest blockbuster movie to the parents of the children. First creating a need in these children to look up to these movies and characters, then telling them that there are toys, sugar & caffeine filled drinks and fast food available related to these characters, hooking them (literally with caffeine, sugar, fat) to these products and the feelings related to those.
Think about it. Really. Do you want Disney to be raising your children ?
to quote my favorite seen from the lion king reference: "http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000591/quotes "look harder". You can parse URL's in JavaScript using window.location or anchor.href, both provide solutions for parsing URL's... someone else from this thread referenced: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6168260/how-to-parse-a-url/6168370#6168370 (above i believe)...
My older son had a Lion King addiction, so I know what you mean. I was thinking in terms of movies for grown-ups, though.
Much is said about protecting children from video games, but what about other mediums (mainly TV, given its exposure)?
Any station can air some movie at 4pm featuring the good cops shooting the bad guys. Or, for instance, it is easy to be watching some news report at dinner and being exposed to something beating the horror or gore movies by points.
Aren't kids exposed since birth to the notion that violence becomes acceptable if against the bad guys? Where goes the moral of don't to others what you don't want to be done to you?
Even some very successful animated movies like Lion King end up with the bad guy being killed. Either intentionally or not, kids end up satisfied that the bad guy had what he deserved and that all become happily ever after.
I'm not for one side or the other, I just wanted to raise some questions to see what you guys think. I don't think video games are bad for children, but I agree they have to be picked appropriately for their age. But I also think we end up avoiding violence in the obvious places but letting kids completely exposed to it in another ones.
It's somewhat of a kids' movie, but it's quite dark and might be scary for younger kids. (Kind of like The Lion King, which was also dark and scary.)
I too enjoyed the movie quite a bit. I can agree that the plot was simplistic, but I for one did not find the dialog horrible. Like the review points out, it comes off like something mixing elements of Disney movies like "The Lion King" and "Pocahontas," which admittedly are movies I get a little choked up at. For me personally, that gave it a certain innocence and heartfelt quality. Is it predictable?Sure, but that doesn't neccessarily make it bad. I was emotionally engaded as well as visually stimulated, if not intellectually challenged by the film. For better or worse, that made it great for me.
There's a bit of the whole Dreamworks vs Pixar thing.
Ok here we go...
Pixar consistently produces a form of the art that is simply higher than Dreamworks can even approach.
The thing about that is, that the two studios produce films for completely different markets. Dreamworks focusses directly on producing films for children (with a few outliers) and Pixar focusses on producing films for everyone (with a few outliers)
Pixar's process is more story focussed than other studios, A typical Pixar film usually has a 4 year production cycle in which the first two of those are spent primarily on writing and rewriting the story to get the "feel" right. Even then, they have no problem with changing the story at the 11th hour.
Case in point - WALL-E's ending was originally very different with WALL-E originally saving EVE from the trash compactors (essentially larger versions of WALL-E for irony). After the film was complete and was screened in Portland, Andrew Stanton changed the ending to what it is today. The story flows better.
Compare that to something Dreamworks. Dreamworks focusses on making films which are more technically proficient and aimed at children (Kung Fu Panda was astounding from a technical standpoint and dominated the "Annies" last year, which is the animation industries version of the Emmys).
Dreamworks are more focussed on the business side, rather than the entertainment side of the process.
That's also why Dreamworks films are typically heavily backed by merchandising and advertising blitzes, because of this focus.
So it's difficult to compare the two, it would be like saying a Michael Bay film is comparable to a Tarantino film. The fact is, they have different markets and so approach the filmmaking process in different ways.
Nobody in their right mind would try and compare the two film styles.
Lastly, before you try and judge Dreamworks' animation pedigree, Jeffrey Katzenberg co-founded the studio and he was responsible for the classic Disney franchsies between 88 and 94 like The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast (which I might add is the ONLY animation film EVER to be nominated for best film at the Oscars).
It still amazes me that analysts fail to see Pixar films for what they really are: Aimed at everyone, not just children. This is why the franchise aspect of the films is a little harder.
Here is the basic recipe for a Pixar film. The main character has to "grow" throughout the film while facing what are essentially adult problems - using animation as the vehicle for story telling.
Compare that to Dreamworks - who's style is heavily influenced by Jeffrey Katzenberg who is responsible for Disney's great run of films in the late 80's and early 90's (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast & Aladdin) before leaving in 94 and founding Dreamworks with Spielberg.
Dreamworks animations are aimed directly at children because of this influence, the stories are often not as complex and the jokes are simpler. They're geared for pumping out 2 films a year instead of just the 1 and are heavily backed up by merchandising. Their marketing teams absolutely blitz the public and this is probably why Shrek 2 is still the highest grossing animated film of all time, even though several films from both studios are better.
Now if the NY Times really wants to make an article about Pixar's future success, they should perhaps write about how the next few films after UP won't be directed by Pixar's main stable of directors (Stanton, Lasseter, Bird and Docter) instead seeing a generational change with new directors handling old franchises.
As Brad Bird of Pixar said during their documentary The Pixar Story
"This is an anomaly, this place is really freakishly alone in this hit after hit aspect"
It's not really a case of if they will make a film that fails, it's when - I personally hope that it never happens, but I'm not that naive.