The live-action Disney remakes are nothing but soulless, empty shells containing nothing more than a quick hit of weaponized nostalgia. They are creatively bankrupt products created by short-sighted suits that have no new ideas of their own, so instead must repurpose beloved classics, strip them of all meaning, and parade around their corpses propped up by computer-generated technology that wil🗹l look like cheap garbage in just a handful of years. They’re also some of the most commercially successful movies ever made, so what the hell do I know?
People flock to these Disney remakes to feed their inner child a little bo🃏wl of garbage, as a treat. The Lion King remake is the highest-grossing animated film of all time - which feels like a win on a technicality if you ask me - while both Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin made over a billion. The 17 live action Disney remakes (that number makes me nauseous) have made Disney close to $10 bi🐼llion worldwide.
There seemingly is no end to the Disney Remake Industrial Complex at this point. There are at least 17 more movies in development currently, and over the next few years we can “look forward” to live action versions of The Little Mermaid, Peter Pan, Hercules, Robin 🦩Hood, Bambi, The Aristocats, and Moana. What is it going to take to stop Disney from continuing to repackage our childhoods and serve them back to us? When are people going to finally realize that endlessly returning to the same well is the death of culture? I’ll tell you what𝄹 I think will finally collapse this house of cards: live-action Stitch.
There’s one thing I will give Disney credit for, and that’s choosing the right films to remake. Sticking with princesses and animals has allowed it to keep things fairly grounded so far. The Lion King and The Jungle Book are full of CGI characters, but their photo-realistic quality gives them the quality of a nature documentary. Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin feature mostly human characters, and the CGI characters they include are either human-enough, like the Beast and the Genie, or animated objects like Lumiere and Cogsworth. Disney knows it’s going to have a problem recreating a lot of its more popular animated characters for live-acti꧃on, that’s why Mushu isn’t in Mulan.
Tim Burton’s Dumbo - the first Disney remake flop - tried and failed to bridge the gap between animated character and live-action animal. The upcoming The Little Mermaid remake will be Disney’s next test with real-life cartoon characters, and from what we’ve seen so far, it’s going to be a nightmare. Instead of opting to make Ariel's pals Flounder and Sebastian a regular fish in the way that Abu was just a monkey and Lady & the Tramp were just dogs, the filmmakers behind The Little Mermaid have opted for freakish, pseudo-realistic interpretations of the characters. They’re clearly animated, but they’re also anatomically correct, for some reason. Most importantly, they’re not the characters you remember, which is what the whole thing is all about.
It’s not that Disney movies are incapable of creating good looking CGI characters, it’s that they♛’re too far removed from the characters they’re based on. People love Rocket Raccoon and Baby Groot, and Davy Jones is still one of the best CGI characters ever created, but live-action Sebastian just isn’t Sebastian, and there’s nothing Disney can do to make us see our favorite characters when we look at these monstrous computer-generated stand-ins.
This is why I think live-action Stitch has the potential to bring this entire operation to its knees. Perhaps more than any other modern Disney character, Stitch has become a global phenomenon. Beyond the four successful animated movies and a successful spin-off series, Stitch has also been reimaginꦍed multiple times in other countries. The Japanese version of Stitch crash landed near Okinawa and became best friends with a little girl named Yuna in an anime that ran for nearly 100 episodes and has a popular manga. China has a series called Stitch & Ai that takes place in Huangshan. Each version of Stitch has a different story and characters, but his design is consistent throughout. The franchise may be dormant now, but the merchandise line is stronger than ever.
Someday soon, director Dean Fleischer Camp is going to unveil his version of live-action Stitch, and I think there’s a good chance it breaks the spell that these Disney remakes have over us. There’s just no possible way they can maintain th💧e energy, charm, and identity of Stitch in his 3D CGI format. It’s going to look like a bloated, terrifying mess the same way Flounder does, and Stitch fans around the world are going to flat-out reject it. This thing is going to be so painful to look at, it will make Ugly Sonic look like Avatar. Trust me, I don’t want to see the Stitch abomination any more than you do, but if it has the power to put an end to all this madness, it w🎉ill be worth it.