• The Lion King

    July 25, 2019 - By 

    Real life looks boring. Rocks look boring. Trees look boring. Fluffy animals look boring. No-one opens their curtains in the morning and thinks wow, look at all that! This is a problem for The Lion King, one that sinks Disney’s photo-realistic reproduction almost from the word go. Jon Favreau’s nearly beat-for-beat prideland retread (new scenes expand the 1994 original’s 88 minute runtime) is a weird, alienating exercise in uncanny cynicism: the transparent cash-grabbing motive is depressing, but not nearly as depressing as having to actually watch the thing, which ticks over with the shiny time-killing futility of a high-res screensaver.…

  • Aladdin

    May 30, 2019 - By 

    How is it possible for something to be both the same, and less? It’s a curious philosophical achievement Disney have found themselves excelling at since they decided to take their beloved animated properties out of Walt-style cryo-freeze and serve them back up to us, re-animated in flesh and blood. The latest in the mega-corp’s line of live-action simulacrums, Aladdin is a magic carpet ride that never gets off the ground, a weirdly lumpy Arabian Nights retread from Guy Ritchie, the obvious go-to guy for a fun, campy Middle Eastern romance. It’s much the same as you remember: Aladdin (Mena Massoud)…

  • Beauty and the Beast

    March 21, 2017 - By 

    One of the reasons fairy tales work is that they are so obviously not real. Their fantastical, exaggerated qualities help make the horror, weirdness and romantic impossibilities easier to process. And while it wasn’t exactly frightening, Disney’s iconic animated musical Beauty and the Beast, part of the late-80s/early 90s “Disney Renaissance”, had an understanding of how to build Gothic contrast, moreso than even the 18th-century French original, in which the Beast is not Beauty’s jailor but her doting servant. There was a strangeness to Beauty and the Beast‘s obviously warped story; not just the Stockholm Syndrome infatuation, or the intense…