The Cowardice of Live-Action Remakes
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There's a coincidental yet meaningful connection between two of this summer's buzziest movies. The new Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon are both remakes; beyond that, they're both live-action adaptations of animated films—each of which happened to have been co-directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders. Lilo & Stitch has made a fortune at the box office since its late-May debut; How to Train Your Dragon, which opens today, seems similarly poised for success. The two features are, if a little lacking in visual stimulation compared with their forebears, reliably entertaining. But taken together, they signal something rather alarming in Hollywood's ongoing crisis of imagination: The timeline for nostalgia is growing shorter.
Since Tim Burton's big-budget take on Alice in Wonderland grossed more than $1 billion in 2010, the live-action remake has become an inevitable, pervasive cinematic trend. Fifteen years later, it seems that capturing similar financial success requires a studio to look at progressively more recent source material to work with. Disney's attempt to update the nearly 90-year-old Snow White failed at the box office earlier this year; the company shuffled efforts such as a new Pinocchio and Peter Pan off to streaming, despite the recognizable directors and casts involved. The muted response to these modern takes on decades-old classics perhaps explains the move toward reviving properties that resonate with much younger generations instead. The original Lilo & Stitch is 23 years old; How to Train Your Dragon, produced by DreamWorks Animation, is only 15. Next year, a remake of Moana will hit theaters less than a decade after the original film's release. Is that even enough time to start feeling wistful about it?
Clearly, the answer is yes, given how audiences have flocked to similar adaptations. The sentimental fervor around franchises such as How to Train Your Dragon is particularly unsettling to me, because the first entry premiered when I was fully an adult; the DreamWorks canon (which also includes such films as Shrek and Kung Fu Panda) was established when I was past the ideal age to become invested. However, I've seen How to Train Your Dragon many times because my daughter is a fan; that intense familiarity helped me out as I watched the live-action version, looking for anything that might feel different about it—which would thus justify its creation.
[Read: The lesson Snow White should teach Disney]
Not so much. DeBlois, who also directed the two How to Train Your Dragon sequels, makes his live-action debut by adapting his own feature; as such, the end result is wildly similar to the earlier work. The new film is again set in a Viking village that is constantly besieged by different kinds of dragons. The plucky teen son of the chief, a boy named Hiccup (played by Mason Thames), befriends a sleek black dragon named Toothless and learns that fighting the beasts isn't the only answer. The actor who voiced Hiccup's father in the animated film, Gerard Butler, returns to perform the role on-screen; in all other cases, the film uses well-suited performers to replace the voice cast.
To my own surprise, I liked the new version of How to Train Your Dragon about as much as I do its ancestor. Both, to me, are above-average bits of children's entertainment that struggle with the same problems: They start to sag near the end and suffer a little from their murky color palette. I got a little choked up at the exact same point that I do while watching the 2010 Dragon, when Hiccup and Toothless take to the sky together; the boy rides on a saddle he's made for his fire-breathing pal, and the composer John Powell's excellent score soars into inspirational mode, all strings and bagpipes.
If there's a difference between these redone scenes and their inspirations, it's a remarkably minor one; only good theater decorum stopped me from pulling out my phone and running the two Dragons side by side. Hollywood is struggling to get people to buy movie tickets, so I understand the impulse to offer something that a broad swath of viewers already knows and likes. But there's simply no sense of risk in making something like How to Train Your Dragon—nothing that will convince said theatergoers that the medium has a future beyond recycling. Yes, visual-effects technology is up to the task of re-creating a cartoon on a larger scale and dotted with real actors, and yes, these redos tend to turn a profit for their makers. These shouldn't be the only reasons for art to exist.
[Read: Why is Disney trying so hard to dilute its brand?]
Lilo & Stitch, at least, diverges somewhat from its source material. Because most of the characters are human beings, its world seems easier to translate to one composed of flesh and blood. The film, like How to Train Your Dragon, is about a shiftless youngster (Lilo, a Hawaiian girl who has been acting out since the death of her parents) bonding with a fantasy creature (Stitch, a blue alien experiment designed as a weapon of destruction). The director Dean Fleischer Camp's tweaks for his rendition didn't particularly click for me, however. One amusing character (another alien who is searching for Stitch) is absent entirely, and the revised ending has prompted some pushback, though Fleischer Camp has tried to defend it.
In theory, I should be pro-change, given that I found the carbon-copy nature of How to Train Your Dragon so irksome—except that Lilo & Stitch doesn't really commit to its big alterations. The animated versions of Lilo and her older sister, Nani, forge a closer connection after meeting Stitch and his extraterrestrial hunters; the live-action Lilo enters the care of family friends at the end of the film, so that Nani can go off to study in California. These adjustments to the girls' relationship are a bit bold, because the prior film is so emotionally focused on their frayed sisterhood, yet the remake quickly undercuts their separation with the revelation that Nani can just visit Lilo anytime she wants, thanks to some space technology that Nani has borrowed.
Such a cop-out is the underlying, depressing reality with all of these remakes: No change can be too daring, no update too significant. It's heartening that Sanders, a co-director of the original Dragon and Stitch, is one of the few people working in animation who's still committed to innovation. Last year, he directed The Wild Robot; much like How to Train Your Dragon, it is an adaptation of a children's book upon which Sanders found an exciting visual spin. The movie was a critical success, a box-office hit, and an Academy Award nominee. Cinema needs more entries like The Wild Robot—novel works that take chances and trust the audience to follow along. If nothing else, they provide fodder for more live-action remakes in the near future. Hollywood can't have these nostalgic adaptations without something to redo in the first place.
Article originally published at The Atlantic
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