In the run-up to the release of the highly anticipated remake of The Lion King, the film was generally referred to as a live-action reinterpretation of the 1994 animated classic, the latest in a string of such films Disney has released in recent years, including Dumbo. But if you think about it for more than two seconds, that can't possibly be an accurate description, because lions, hyenas, meerkats and warthogs don't actually talk. Or dance. Or burst into song.
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So The Lion King should actually be categorised as an animated film, albeit one using cutting-edge digital tools in pursuit of photorealism instead of the original film's stylised hand-drawn animation, right?
Well, that's not exactly it either. Yes, The Lion King was made entirely using computer-generated imagery, all 1600 shots of it. But at the same time, the movie's creative team also used a range of live-action filmmaking tools and techniques - from lighting to camera movement to set dressing - that have been around for more than a century, as well as a few that are entirely new.
Even director Jon Favreau isn't sure what exactly to call it.
"There's so much confusion as to what the medium is," Favreau says of the film, which was developed through Disney's live-action division rather than Walt Disney Animation Studios. "Is it a hybrid? Even that is misleading ... The trick here was to make it feel like an entirely new medium. Even though we use animation techniques, we wanted it to appear live-action. And that required a lot of technical and technological innovation."
On the most basic level, the film is indeed best described as animated, taking computer-animation tools that Favreau utilised on his 2016 remake of The Jungle Book - which, in turn, had built on what James Cameron had pioneered in Avatar - and extending them even further. While The Jungle Book had one real, flesh-and-blood onscreen performer - Neel Sethi, who played Mowgli - surrounded by digitally created animals and environments, everything you see in The Lion King is the product of digital artists painting with ones and zeroes.
"The Jungle Book was almost like a first go-round, and after that I felt like I was ready to take out the security blanket of removing the one human element," Favreau says.
"Pulling the one kid out, we just jumped over to using similar techniques but now we were going to be completely animated and none of it was going to be live-action ... . Every single shot, every performance, is key-frame animated. There's no motion capture. It's not like we scanned an animal doing it. It's artists hand-animating everything, just like Bambi."
But it's a little more complicated than that.
In fact, the Lion King team deviated in critical ways from the typical CGI animation process, blending animation and live-action approaches in a unique way.
All of the film's environments and animals were rendered digitally, and then those low-resolution computer-generated elements were subsequently loaded into a kind of virtual-reality movie set, where Favreau and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel set about working out how to film them as though they were making a live-action movie.
"We built an entire VR volume that an entire camera crew could be in," Favreau says.
"We would pop on the headsets and we would all be there scouting this sort of video-game version of The Lion King with pre-animated sequences and rendered environments.
"We would move around real dollies and those dollies and those wheels would be operating virtual cameras within VR.
"Everything was meant to emulate what the process would be like if we were filming this for real."
- McClatchy
