Rotten Tomatoes Score will drop at 11:30 AM this morning. Gonna bet safely and guess that it doesn’t clear 85%.
That is a good enough Pumba but i'm not really feeling Timon. Man they desperately need expressions, it feels incomplete. And I'm not buying the ''mah realism'' excuse as if its a limitation. It's a stylistic choice that is just weird.
That video is like I am watching a NatGeo nature documentary on lion pack hierarchy dynamics (dominant male takes over, tries to kill off the previous male's offspring) if I take the sound off. The realistic faces are so unxpressive. How bad must Timon and Pumbaa look like, that they are not showing them in any trailers despite them being the breakout stars of the old movie who got their own show and movie? Edit: never mind just saw the next post. Ohboy, as bad as expected. They even tailored Pumbaa a bit, he looks more pekari than warthog, likely focus groups found that one too ugly.
Btw never understood that name, "Beyonce"... I always heard it as "beyond C" and just assumed it was to indicate she can sing higher than C-sharp. Mowgli was better for it, those were the proper "anthropomorphic" faces to use for a movie about intelligent talking animals. Really, it's the same as with designing anthropomorph characters - if you just put an animal head on a human body it won't emote as well as a human would. You need to change the features a bit, especially the eyes, eyebrows and mouth, so they can convey the same range of emotions like us humans. Examples of this are for example Smaug, Anubis from Gods of Egypt, or even the main character from the Dragonheart movie. Had they just gave the dragons the levels of expression a lizard can make... It would have been bad.
I knew that being so close to the original was going to be both a major pull for marketing but also a major weakness for the actual film. I listened to Hakuna Matata and while song lyrics staying the same is one thing, almost every non-singing line in the song (at least on the track) is from the original film, and I can see people being irritated with that. I fully expect Nostalgia Critic to post a 20 minute whine-fest about how greedy Disney is and how dumb and adult this movie or something, but I digress. I’ve been listening to the soundtrack at work, and again, the score is wonderful. Hans adds new embellishments and additions to the returning themes. To Die For is even more breathtaking than the original in particular. Circle of Life was kind of a letdown besides the extra instruments, though. It literally reuses the original Lebo vocals and 80% of the original track’s music. I was really hoping for more new instruments and orchestra and whatever, and to hear Lebo re-record it. While it’s cool that Lindiwe from the Broadway show sings it, the problem is that she sang such a different arrangement of the song that it feels odd for her to slow down and sing it less bombastically than she did on stage, and she ends up sounding quieter than the instrumentals and choir. Be Prepared is going to be the one that enrages fans, though. While I myself am disappointed that more wasn’t used, what we got wasn’t that bad either. Chiwetel actually has a nice voice which we really should’ve gotten more of. This Be Prepared is more of a war rally than the original was with a bit of singing. Of all the things Favreau kept the exact same, this should’ve been the same too, but I still like it. Lion Sleeps Tonight is really fun, Hakuna Matata sounds great even though Rogen clearly sounds like he knew he couldn’t sing from the get-go (not that Rogen isn’t great but why not cast an actor who can sing?). Meanwhile Eichner kills it and Glover is great. Saving my experience with Can You Feel the Love Tonight and King of Pride Rock for the theater. I really really wish we had gotten Shadowland instead of Spirit, which really does sound like your typical pop song meant to sell with marginal ties to the actual film. Shadowland would’ve charted just fine and would’ve actually been a part of the movie. Aw well, there’s this fake demo of Shadowland floating around the web that sounds like Beyoncé so I’ll take that. EDIT: @Red Goblin D’oh, you beat me to posting it. IMDB folks kept floating around the idea that Be Prepared was originally cut but added back in at the last second to respond to fan backlash. I found this story logistically implausible given the expense of animating this movie, and there wasn’t really that much outrage to begin with, so what was there to fold to? But hearing how it’s mostly speaking, with the end kinda becoming a song... I’m starting to wonder. Like I said, I still like the little bit we got, but I could tell it was gonna be downplayed after Chiwetel danced around answering what it was like to sing Be Prepared.
Critics hated Aladdin but audiences loved it. Idc about the lack of expressions as much as I should, theyre hyper-realistic animals. Seeing that I love animals, I am still looking forward to this.
Ironically, someone dubbed the song over a real lion, and it’s actually more expressive than the CG animal. charles entertainment cheese on Twitter
But the way I see it, that's what the cartoon is for. (And in all fairness, that's why movies about talking animals are generally done with cartoons). The vision for this movie is supposed to be a live-action Lion King. Yes the characters are CGI, but they're supposed to function as if they're 'acted' by real animals (similar to something like Homeward Bound). Giving the animals anthropomorphic faces would make it closer to something like "The Wild". Fair enough if that's what you'd prefer, but it's a pretty different vision. I have no doubt that this will fail to surpass the cartoon, but I admire the limitations put in place by the filmmakers inn order to provide a different experience.
