So many live actions...

In the recent years the amount of 'live action' adaptations from traditional animation films has seen a sharp rise. This holds true for movies such as The Lion King or The Jungle Book. Others have simply taken an animated character and made a realistic render of it in some live action film such as Detective Pikachu or the upcoming Sonic movie. Now, I do know that incredible amounts of work go into rendering each individual hair on the fur of an animal and a keen eye and a lot of time is needed to model the characters realistically, however, I would like to argue, that these new adaptations are completely unnecessary and even perjudicial if you think about it.

Different adaptations of the Jungle Book

First of all, these new adaptations in the pursuit of realism devalue the time and work that has gone into their 2d counterparts, it feels as if they are not considered good enough by themselves so they have to be reformed to cater to present audiences. The idea that something is not mature or good enough until it is dark, gritty or realistic is something that has been going around and quite frankly I find it ridiculous to apply to kid's movies especially.

Furthermore, in many cases 2d animation is much more appropriate due to its versatility and its amazing capacity to withstand the pass of time. Take the following images as an example:

The first shots seem lackluster compared to the ones from the 2d animation that radiate colour an truly get across the feeling of the incipient celebration of the birth of the prince and portray the savannah as a rich and warm place where one would like to be. Moreover, in the future we might look back at the 3d rendering of the live action movie and find many errors that break our immersion whilst the original film, even when nearly 25 years have passed seems as good as the first time we watched it. 

Unfortunately, another thing that these new movies allow is the stealing of the previous animators' work. As you can see in the images above, many shots in the new movie are near identical to the old one and the ones who originally came up with them don't even need to be credited when they are being used in this new film.

As a final note, I must add the fact that some character designs are completely ruined in the new adaptations. For instance, there has been an uproar with the sonic design since he is supposed to be a character that looks cartoonish and somewhat cute and has been rendered into a muscly anthropomorphic monster covered in blue hair which is not aesthetically appealing at all.

 New movie has visible muscles

There is a reason why the design has not changed much in such a long time: it works.

This can also be seen with the difference in the design of Rafiki in the old Lion King vs the new one.

I would argue that in the first image he looks pretty terrifying, with an undecipherable expression meanwhile in the second image he seems friendly and welcoming, such as his character should be according to the role he plays in the movie.

expressive colours and character design are lost (e.g rafiki, e.g sonic the hedghog.)