Fueled by Nostalgia: Revisiting Beloved Films in New Animated Forms
Remakes are nothing new. Hollywood constantly re-adapts its own work with new perspectives. It’s an inspiration source, not a metric of judgment, and far too often remakes are maligned just for being remakes.
There’s a new thread pulling through animation that does offer a bit more concern. Studios are recreating their own work in a slightly different style, maybe with some new material, and presenting the projects as new films. They technically are, in the way that a new cover design and a new forward makes a new edition of an older novel a new work. Look past the cover and the context and it’s the same story with a new coat of paint.
Did I ever expect to be comparing a big budget Disney remake with an accidentally absurdist Tom and Jerry film? No. But here we are.
The Lion King and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory are cemented in American pop culture as classic family films. They’re beautifully executed fantasy stories with lovely visuals, great performances, and catchy songs. They dare to tread into darker material for children’s stories, grappling with poverty, destruction, genuine danger, and even mortality. I was, quite frankly, terrified of Willy Wonka growing up, and very much remember sobbing uncontrollably when I finally got to see The Lion King in theaters. The films earn their happily ever afters and their status as cinematic classics.
In 2017, a direct to video animated feature called Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was quietly released. It is a shot for shot remake of the original 1971 film from a different perspective. Sure, you see all the children in their iconic candy room scenes, but from a different angle. Literally.
The film centers on Tom and Jerry, the cartoon cat and mouse team, as they try to stop the evil Slugworth and his delivery dog henchmen (Spike, the recurring bulldog of the short films) from stealing the Everlasting Gobstopper and ruining their friend Charlie’s tour of the chocolate factory. Slugworth even gets to sing “I Want It Now” as a villain song, declaring his intentions to ruin Willy Wonka in front of Charlie, Tom, and Jerry. Tom and Jerry are aided by Toffee (the baby mouse from the shorts), who is an Oompa Loompa intern. I said what I said.
The Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka film went viral last year when someone shared the trailer for a later release of the film. The internet was horrified by what felt like a blatant rip off of the original film. It is, mostly. I genuinely think they traced over the original film to get some of the recreated scenes, though that doesn’t tell the full story. There are very different angles on very memorable moments because the camera is tracking Tom and Jerry running through the factory, not the children being the absolute worst. The creative decision to recreate the look and iconography of the original film is a bland one, but there is some effort put into new material as Tom, Jerry, and Toffee are chased by Slugworth and Spike through the backrooms and substructures of the factory.
This is not to say it’s a good film; it’s not. The pacing is very unusual and the storyline is quite pointless. A child is not going to watch this version first, so the twist in the story being the same as the original makes every moment the film focuses on utterly pointless. The only slightly interesting elements happen early in the film, where Tom and Jerry try to steal a box of Wonka Bars for Charlie that ultimately contain the last Golden Ticket that no one else can find. That’s at least a clever attempt to wrap these characters into the world of Willy Wonka.
Meanwhile, in 2019, Disney made a big push to convince us all that a fully animated The Lion King shot for shot remake was a live action film; it was not. It was an animated remake of an animated film, aiming for realism instead of the charming style that made some very upsetting story elements palatable for a wide audience. I can handle sweet baby lions with oversized eyes crying over death; I can’t handle realistic looking animals tramping each other to death. It’s horrifying.
2019 was a really rough year for animated cats onscreen. The Lion King was no exception. I sat there in awe at the dull, lifeless nature documentary (but make it egg cracking in March of the Penguins upsetting for the entire runtime) but not really since it’s fiction spectacle from Disney. Even the voice acting was flat and devoid of life. The characters look realistic in a still, but look like they lack and weight or actual presence in the hyper realistic environments. The world is real, but the characters brought me straight to the Uncanny Valley.
There are no new ideas in The Lion King remake. Outside of the new song for Beyonce to sing (which only exists because Beyonce agreed to do the film), everything in the film comes from the original movie or the stage show. In the stage show, it’s lovely music presented with stunning costumes, puppetry, and choreography that establish the world and connect the various animals and settings in the world. In the movie, it’s two to three minutes of a mouse climbing a cliff or insects walking along a branch. There is no narrative justification for these extended instrumental sequences. If you cut them all out, the story would be exactly the same in the film. Even the Broadway show trimmed some of these sequences out a few years ago to cut down on the runtime of the show.
The shot for shot element is incredibly disorienting. Where I can accept very stylized giraffes dancing with lions by the watering hole in the original, the visual of almost-realistic animals who don’t naturally come into such close proximity without conflict is unnerving. Lions and giraffes, for example, naturally avoid each other because they can easily kill each other depending on who gets the first blow in. The perspective of the shot, the proximity to each other, and the copy and paste appearance of similar models make any inter-species scene very disorienting.
I almost wish the film didn’t bother with moving the lips while the animals were speaking. It’s quite amazing that a fully animated feature had Mr. Ed level mouth movements for dialogue. I know it’s impossible to feed a CGI animal peanut butter to make it move its mouth, but that’s all I could think of as the animators forced creatures to contort their mouths in unnatural ways to form human speech. In the original film, everything is stylized and the world justifies animals talking like that. In the remake, I’m horrified at Zazu snapping his incredibly sharp beak at two baby lions with an angry look on his face.
The idea of profiting off of nostalgia is nothing new. I remember the collective bewilderment when Gus Van Sant literally did a shot for shot remake of Psycho, but in color and with more gratuitous nudity. The collective battle cry was “why?” Somehow, the Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory film met the same fate, while Disney’s The Lion King remake was praised for photorealistic animation; at least the former tried to do anything new with the story to justify its existence. Either way, remakes are becoming more and more common as a way to retain the rights to properties that might revert back to other companies of fall into the public domain. There’s no stopping this trend, and the massive box office success of The Lion King will surely see more shot for shot but slightly different in style remakes come down the pike soon enough. I can only hope that we get more beautiful messes like Dumbo than copy/paste remakes in the future.
Tom and Jerry: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is available to purchase on all digital platforms. The Lion King is available on Disney Plus and to purchase on all digital platforms.
