The live-action remake is alive and well. But can something so lifeless really be considered alive?
This year alone, we’ve seenDisneyandDreamworksreanimate the corpses of three classic animated films. The live-action remakes of Snow White, Lilo & Stitch, and How to Train Your Dragon were not all equally successful — Snow White didn’t even make back its budget, while Lilo & Stitch is the sole Hollywood movie to cross the billion mark at the box office this year. But something they all had in common was an apparent mandate to maintain the character designs of their animated inspirations, regardless of how horrifying those creatures became when faithfully translated to live-action.
Now You Might Think It’s Ridiculous…
This requirement has grown more and more ironclad in recent years. Back in 2016, Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book had room to take established characters in bold new directions. King Louie, the crooning orangutan from the 1967 cartoon, became a gigantopithecus in the remake, because orangutans are not native to India, while bones that may have belonged to giant prehistoric primates have been found there since. Jump forward and you have a Stitch, Toothless, and seven dwarves who look extremely similar to their cartoon counterparts.
In the nine years since, one catalyzing event changed the way Hollywood approached live-action remakes, and it’s visible in all of this year’s attempts whether we want to see it or not. We must honor Ugly Sonic. He casts a long, oddly human-looking shadow.
What Ugly Sonic Hath Wrought
In late 2018, the poster for theSonic the Hedgehogfilm was released, and despite the fact that it only showed Sonic in silhouette, that glimpse was enough to cause some doubts about the adaptation’s direction. When the first trailer hit YouTube the following spring, fans recoiled at the movie’s depiction of the Blue Blur, which was even more jarring in motion. He had long grotesquely hairy legs, strange square teeth, separated eyes, and weirdly human proportions. It was met with immediate, forceful backlash. If you go back and look at YouTube comments on the original trailer, they almost uniformly mention how weird Sonic looks, and many projected that the movie would do poorly as a result.
That didn’t end up being the case because, a few days later,director Jeff Fowler took to Twitter to announce that Sonic was being redesigned to look closer to his video game form. That meant that the movie ended up delayed out of 2019. But it also meant that Sonic the Hedgehog was a franchise-spawning hit instead of a footnote in the checkered history of video game adaptations.
Oh, How Things Have Changed By Staying The Same
Since then, live-action adaptations' depictions of non-human characters have stayed close to their inspirations. Clickers in HBO’sThe Last of Usseries look a whole lot like Clickers in The Last of Us games. Claptrap looks exactly the same in theBorderlandsmovie and games, andThe Super Mario Bros. Moviekept Mario’s iconic cast looking quite close to their video game iterations. The one big exception would seem to be Donkey Kong, butNintendo says video game Donky Kong inspired the movie’s look.
If that doesn’t make sense given that Donkey Kong Bananza is launching more than two years after The Super Mario Bros. Movie well,Bananza was in pre-production before work began on the movie.
How to Train Your Dragon might be the most egregious example we’ve seen yet. Its Toothless is, well, toothless, a riskless transcription of the dragon fans have loved since the first film hit theaters in 2010. It has more realistic scales, but the proportions are exactly the same — especially the massive, emerald green eyes.
I’m not saying I want live-action movies to be more grounded, necessarily. HTTYD is a kids movie, and it should be fun and larger than life. But it fits into the general problem the movie has: that in large stretches it’s a simple shot-for-shot remake of the original film. A cartoonish CGI character would be interesting if it was done in service of an unique vision. But in HTTYD’s case, it’s the result of slavish devotion to the source material.
I get why studios are scared of going in new directions. If the last decade of nerd culture has taught us anything, it’s that seemingly small creative decisions can prompt outsized backlash. Sonic’s live-action design was, undoubtedly,off. It was ugly and kinda scary in a way that would have been offputting to its intended audience: children. But there’s space for creature designs that land somewhere in between. We don’t need to choose between exact replicas on one hand and nightmare fuel on the other.
