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Despite making over $1.8 billion at the box office, the 2019 Lion King remake was not fully appreciated by all audiences. Many critics took aim at the lack of facial expressions. In response to the criticism artist Nikolay Mochkin and Instagram user @jonty_pressinger worked together to redo parts of the movie with deepfake style technology to give the characters more expressive range.
The result has been hailed by some as a success with people asking the duo to remake the entire movie in this style. Others have claimed the 2019 version was supposed to be live action and more realistic; that this attempt to add expression missed the point.
Yes, the original release of "The Lion King" was 25 years ago.
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The Lion King: Remake gets ‘DeepFake’ Makeover
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In Tulsa, Oklahoma, it is against the law to open a soda bottle without
the supervision of a licensed engineer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @08:03AM (4 children)
The problem with the movie is not that it looks too real, but faces needed some "eyebrows" or darkened hair around the top of the eyes. They say the gateway to the soul is the eyes. Just some simple eyebrows or facial movement around the eyes to add to their expression would do wonders. What facial features they do have are flattened by the mute color palette, which makes both distinguishing facial expressions and getting the mood of the scene from the background harder. Plus, half the scenes seem to take place in shadow or dark (probably to make rendering easier or flaws less noticeable), so even if the above were there, they would be hard to pick up on. Plus, there is a not-quite-right feeling to some of the movements, at least for me, that makes the lack of expression even worse because now you are distracted by other things too.
Disney should have left this out to pasture when they got the sickly thing back from the render farm.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @08:18AM (3 children)
This movie compared to the original could be the best example of what is lost when you rigidly adhere to photorealism. Obviously, you will get expressionless characters when you model them completely after real animals. Total cash grab by Disney and they will keep pumping these out unless they start bombing at the box office. And this one isn't. [cinemablend.com] The foreign box office gross is helping to prop up mediocre movies like this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @12:32PM
Well, what do you expect from an entire generation that grew up with crappy videogame cgi and have never known any better.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday August 12 2019, @01:58PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2019, @05:58PM
No, just do an image search for "happy lion" or "sad lion" or "angry lion." You can see plenty of examples of them showing emotion that we would recognize as such. In addition, a lot of that comes from small touches and the eye shape. It isn't the photorealism providing too much detail that is the problem, it is the bad animation that lacks detail that is the problem.