Disney has been riding that magic carpet of live-action remakes for quite some time now, truly kicking off the trend with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. From there, we’ve had so-called “updates” of Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo, and on and on – none of which really capture the magic of the original animated films. And we highly doubt a real-life Forky wouldn’t be nightmare fuel…
Pete Doctor has been with Pixar since the earliest features, developing the story for and working on the animation of Toy Story. He has since gone on to direct four features for the studio, three of which won the Best Animated Feature Oscar – and that’s just the realm he’d like to stay in, saying live-action remakes just don’t work for what they do. “So much of what we create only works because of the rules of the [animated] world. So if you have a human walk into a house that floats, your mind goes, ‘Wait a second. Hold on. Houses are super heavy. How are balloons lifting the house?’ But if you have a cartoon guy and he stands there in the house, you go, ‘Okay, I’ll buy it.’ The worlds that we’ve built just don’t translate very easily.”
As for the live-action remake trend as a whole, Doctor added, “This might bite me in the butt for saying it, but it sort of bothers me. I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves. To remake it, it’s not very interesting to me personally.” The studio actually toyed with the idea of what real-life versions of their characters would look like with the Disney+ series Pixar IRL. While the episodes were never meant to be live-action remakes of any sort, they did offer some light, amusing interactions between their characters and actual people.
There is definitely a place for live-action remakes, but it has to be the right source. After all, there’s a reason that when we published an article just last year on animated movies that could benefit from that treatment, not a single Pixar movie made the list.
Do you think any Pixar movies could make for good live-action remakes? What would you pick? Let us know!