Disney's live-action remakes have dazzled audiences around the world but it takes a
lot of work to make these movies as visually impressive as they are. Don't believe it?
Take a look at how these Disney's live-action remakes look without the CGI.
The visual effects wizards at MPC spent two long years building the wild, dense world
of The Jungle Book, the vast majority of which was created digitally. VFX supervisor Adam
Valdez told Animation World Network:
"When they came to us wanting to do the movie with bluescreen and one kid, it was daunting."
The company had a team from its Bangalore office visit 50 different jungle locations
around India to conduct research for the project. They came back with hundreds of thousands
of reference photos, as well as plenty of animal footage for the visual effects team
to work with. But creating the movie's photo-realistic animals wasn't even the hard part.
Making Bagheera and Baloo's interactions with Mowgli feel genuine was what would ultimately
make or break Jon Favreau's live action remake of The Jungle Book and the MPC team knew that
all too well. Valdez explains:
"The guys in the rigging department spent many months developing and researching facial
anatomy on big cats, wolves and bears, as well as how they move."
In the end, it was an astute suggestion from the director that made all the difference.
According to Valdez:
"Jon had this brilliant idea of using Jim Henson Company puppeteers to work with Neel
Sethi, the actor who plays Mowgli, so that he always had a moving and engaging puppet.
A young person leaves that to the imagination and it came through."
The visual effects artists working on The Jungle Book were also aware that a lot was
riding on the appearance of the story's antagonist, Shere Khan.
"How long did you really think you'd survive against me?"
The human-hating tiger was just a guy in a blue leotard on set, but MPC's team of animators
had to turn him into a fearsome villain. According to the company's VFX supervisor Adam Valdez,
the challenge was in creating animals that were capable of conveying emotion while still
looking completely natural. He told Art of VFX:
"We can all relate to some things, like when a deer reacts with fright. We understand that,
but how does a tiger sit down with intimidating attitude?"
Valdez and his team were on a constant hunt for references as they built Shere Khan from
scratch. He explained:
"Many clips of animal movements were found, recreated and then dialed into the shots.
The animators spent a lot of time on the shots, adding delicate little touches."
Of course, movement is only one aspect of making a convincing CGI animal but Valdez
was never that concerned about the fur. MPC has so much experience with rendering animals
that the company has its very own proprietary tool, Furtility. Valdez says:
"It's quite powerful and I think we have the best hair [and] fur in the business."
To make it easier for Beauty and the Beast director Bill Condon to get a grip on his
CGI-heavy movie, Disney decided to make the experience as physical as possible. VFX supervisor
Kyle McCulloch told Deadline:
"We had the special effects team build some of the characters as animatronics, so they
could actually be animated and moved around on set. We had life-size builds of them that
we could have on set, and then we had puppets."
The Beast was originally going to be achieved using practical effects alone. According to
McCulloch, the two VFX vendors hired to work on the remake discussed using a mixture of
makeup and animatronics, but in the end, the flexibility of the CGI option was just too
tempting to pass up. They also needed to make sure that the fidelity of the actor's performance
wasn't lost. By going digital, they would be able to take the nuance and subtleties
of Dan Stevens' performance and reflect them in the Beast himself. According to McCulloch:
"If you were trying to do it under a thousand pounds of makeup, it was never going to give
us the clarity of performance that Digital Domain ultimately achieved in the Beast."
When Disney decided to remake 1977's Pete's Dragon, it turned to a vendor with a proven
track record of bringing fantasy creatures to life: Weta Digital. Weta has created some
of the most memorable CGI characters in movie history, and has worked with motion capture
legend Andy Serkis on multiple occasions. Serkis won praise for his portrayal of evolved
chimpanzee Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboot series, and Weta took inspiration from
that character when it came to making Pete's titular dragon, Elliott. As Weta's Eric Saindon
told The Hollywood Reporter:
"With Caesar you really felt his pain and happiness, and with Elliot it's the same.
The big challenge was getting the emotion out of Elliot. The connection between the
dragon and Pete is such a big part of the film."
Unlike Caesar, however, Elliott wasn't portrayed by an actor in a motion capture suit. Saindon
recalled:
"We had a green wire mesh head that I would lift over my head. I tried to move the head
as best I thought it would work for the shot, and then we'd track the head with our [CG]
Elliot."
Peter Jackson's King Kong won three Academy Awards in 2006, one of which was for Weta
Digital's groundbreaking VFX work. And the famous ape still looks incredible today but
the company became even better at rendering furry animals in the decade that followed.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Weta's Eric Saindon said:
"King Kong had one million hairs on him, and probably one-quarter of those hairs were simulated
and we interpolated the rest. On Elliot we had 20 million and we individually simulated
each hair, so when Pete is petting or interacting with him, we get the interaction with the
hair."
According to Weta's head of creatures, getting Elliott's fur to look real during close-up
interactions was definitely tricky, but the airborne sequences proved most challenging.
Gios Johnston told Cartoon Brew:
"There are lots of flying shots in the movie and dialing in the right amount of wind for
a dragon flying at very fast speeds also took some doing."
Fans reacted with a mixture of bemusement and horror when the first trailer for Disney's
live-action Aladdin dropped, revealing Will Smith's Genie in all his blueness for the
first time.
"Hellooooo!"
Certainly, the former Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star knew he had some extremely big shoes
to fill but so did the visual effects artists tasked with turning him into a Disney icon.
The remake's VFX supervisor, Chas Jarrett, told CBR:
"We always sort of knew it was going to be contentious, I suppose; that there would be
comparisons between our Genie and the original. But, ultimately, we felt confident in the
character we created."
Finalizing the Genie's look wasn't easy, either. The team had been working on the character
for a year and a half by the time the first trailer came out, constantly tinkering with
his appearance. According to Jarrett, he wasn't initially supposed to look much like Smith
at all, and the VFX team experimented with a range of more cartoonish blue Genies during
pre-production. Ultimately, however, they decided that they wouldn't be making the best
use of the film's biggest star with this approach. As Jarrett says:
"When you've got Will Smith, you realize what makes Will Smith work is all the little Will
Smith mannerisms...If you try to put those mannerisms on something that isn't Will Smith,
it isn't quite satisfying."
According to Aladdin's visual effects supervisor, the iconic "A Whole New World" scene would
have played out quite differently had it not been for director Guy Ritchie's vision. When
Chas Jarrett and his team first started working on the magic carpet ride, they envisioned
the journey taking place over the course of an entire day with the titular street rat
picking up the princess at sunrise and dropping her back at the palace right after sunset.
Jarrett told Art of VFX:
"It worked well, but Guy felt quite strongly that he wanted it to all happen at night as
in the original. So we took helicopter units to a number of locations to Jordan and Namibia
in Africa and filmed elements."
The footage they captured blended well with footage of Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott, who
mimed their own recording of the song in front of a giant bluescreen.
"It literally felt like a, you know, a magic carpet. It was incredible."
According to Naomi Scott, the scene was quite the workout, too since the actors had to support
their own weight as the rig shifted from side to side.
The dress transformation scene isn't just one of the most iconic moments of the original
animated Cinderella it's one of the most iconic Disney moments, period. Naturally, the studio
used snippets from this scene to promote its live-action remake...but this move ended up
backfiring big time.
In one trailer for 2015's Cinderella, star Lily James appears to look a lot thinner around
the waist than she normally does, and the pre-VFX footage seemed to back up claims that
her waistline had been digitally altered. The British actress denied that this was the
case during an interview with the Los Angeles Times, insisting that she was just a really
"healthy" person with a naturally small waist. The actress went on to complain about the
people who were, in her opinion, kicking up a big fuss over nothing. She said:
"I think all that stuff's so negative, and you've got to let it wash over your head."
But how does she explain images that seem to prove that her waist miraculously changed
sizes? It's all down to her on-set fairy godmother, costume designer Sandy Powell. James explained:
"The skirt's big and the corset pulls me in, and that's the point. That's the shape Sandy
Powell created."
Tim Burton's remake of 1941's Dumbo was one of the most ambitious Disney live-action projects
from a visual effects standpoint largely because of the eponymous elephant. Dumbo was animated
entirely from scratch in certain scenes, but when the blue-eyed elephant needed to interact
with one of the humans in the story, creature actor Edd Osmond came in. Osmond was kitted
out with crutch-like arm extensions, and had to walk around on all fours for two to three
hours per day, wearing a variety of different green suits. The actor told Insider:
"It's a very strange job. The struggle with the arm extensions is, if you don't get the
rhythm right if you don't do right arm left leg, left arm right leg you end up walking
like a table."
Osmond was also hooked up to an earpiece so he could communicate with the film's VFX supervisor,
MPC's Richard Stammers, during his scenes. According to Stammers, the four foot six actor
was critical to facilitating physical interaction and eyelines during some of the remake's most
pivotal moments. Stammers told Art of VFX:
"Having Edd there allowed Tim to direct a performance and we would always do our first
rehearsal and takes with Edd in place."
The hardest part of remaking Dumbo was always going to be the flying scenes. It's easy to
suspend your sense of disbelief for animated movies, but when you're watching a live-action
film and the animals look real, that becomes a lot harder to do. In order to make the flight
scenes feel as genuine as possible, the VFX team did a lot of research into birds and
how their wings work in relation to their body. MPC's animation supervisor Catherine
Mullan told Animation World Network:
"You're trying to get as much anticipation and effort into each of the two or three giant
flaps when Dumbo gets off of the ground; those were the key moments. Also, making sure that
he isn't rising up too quickly or easily."
Dumbo flying solo was a challenge, but things got even more complicated when the elephant
had riders. A six-axis rig was constructed and the VFX team used what MPC supervisor
Richard Stammers described as "virtual production techniques." In a nutshell, director Tim Burton
could see a crude version of what Dumbo would actually look like in the finished scene,
there and then. Stammers explains:
"Eva Green and the children, Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins, got to ride this rig, with
each wide or mid shot specially programmed. On-set compositing enabled Tim to approve
performances in context to the animation within minutes of each take being captured."
Winnie the Pooh and the rest of the Hundred Acre Wood gang were painstakingly brought
to life in 2018's live-action Christopher Robin, but bringing the honey-loving bear
and his friends out of the woods and into England's capital city was a mammoth task
for the visual effects crew.
Framestore's VFX supervisor Chris Lawrence singled out some key members of his team during
an in-depth interview with Shoot Online, including the vendor's global director of animation,
Michael Eames. Lawrence explained:
"[Eames] brought an incredible attention to detail and the valuable knowledge of a practitioner.
Often he would simply sketch exactly what he wanted. I thought with Winnie the Pooh
he achieved one of the most subtle, nuanced animated screen performances ever seen."
"Oh, this is very confusing. It may be the hunger."
"You've just eaten!"
"Oh, that's right. Maybe I didn't eat enough."
Bringing Winnie the Pooh to the real world meant that actor Ewan McGregor had to act
opposite some pretty creepy headless dolls in some scenes but this was nothing new for
the Scottish star, who told ScreenRant:
"I did it all in the Star Wars movies, quite a lot. It's like a sort of skill. Just something
else that you have to learn to do."
There are a lot of weird and wonderful characters in Alice in Wonderland, and bringing each
one to life in live-action posed a unique challenge for the remake's crew. Animation
supervisor David Schaub told CinemaBlend:
"From a technical perspective, Stayne was incredibly tricky, since every shot required
an animated CG body underneath a photographic element of Crispin Glover's head."
Because the Knave of Hearts is so tall, Glover spent the entirety of the shoot on stilts.
This guaranteed that eye lines would match up and made things a whole lot easier for
the VFX team, but for Glover, it didn't come easy. According to Schaub, the actor spent
several days hobbling around the set trying to get the hang of it. But at least the process
of getting ready to shoot wasn't too complicated. As Glover himself says:
"There were no prosthetics. There was nothing like that, although there was a scar application...The
rest of it was done in greenscreen."
Tim Burton didn't return to direct the sequel to Alice in Wonderland, but Disney did manage
to secure the services of Ken Ralston, who helped oversee the visual effects on the first
movie. Knowing full well that Alice Through the Looking Glass was going to be an even
bigger challenge for the visual effects department, Ralston brought his Sony Pictures Imageworks
colleague Jay Redd along for some much needed support. Redd told Animation World Network:
"When we started looking at the show, we knew it was going to be gigantic. There was more
variety in this one than the first one. You could safely say it was bigger there were
more varied environments than in the first film."
Star Mia Wasikowska's worked with a lot of greenscreen in the first movie, so she was
well used to it by the time the sequel began shooting. The major difference the second
time around was that her role was a lot more physical, with more running and jumping involved.
The actor told Quirky Inspired:
"Sustaining that level of energy and when you have quite little coming back at you in
terms of the set is challenging. It's just a big green blob of light and there's not
much. We had a few more sets on this film, which was really great, but otherwise it's
quite like an abstract experience."
When Angelina Jolie accepted the lead role in Disney's Maleficent, she brought in her
own personal makeup artist and a special effects makeup guru. Together, they created the anti-heroine's
look, staying as close to the animated version from 1959's Sleeping Beauty as possible. They
crafted facial prosthetics to give Jolie those high cheekbones, which reportedly made execs
at the Mouse House rather nervous. Arjen Tuiten, the makeup artist who created said facial
prosthetics, told Fashionista:
"They were like, 'Wait, what? Prosthetics on Angelina? Why are we covering her up?'
They were not very keen on it."
Jolie insisted on keeping them and ultimately got her way, but the movie still utilized
plenty of visual effects. After all, this is a fantasy movie featuring some major action
sequences the kind of scenes that can only be achieved with CGI. According to Kelly Port,
the movie's VFX supervisor, he and his team decided to adopt a less-is-more approach,
which paid off handsomely. He says:
"For me, visual effects are a tool, and should always be thought of as a tool to support
the film. They always need to serve the purpose of the film and move the story along. That's
when they're most successful. With Maleficent, we knew what was working well and what to
pay attention to."
According to MPC's Jessica Norman, Disney wanted the latest in visual effects for 2019's
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. There were over a thousand VFX artists working on the big
budget sequel at one stage, many of them pouring their time and energy into Angelina Jolie's
flying sequences. Norman told Art of VFX:
"The actress and the other fey characters were filmed whilst attached to operated tuning
fork rigs, on a bluescreen stage. In some shots, we attached CG wings; some shots are
full or partial CG takeovers."
In a behind-the-scenes featurette, Jolie revealed what it's like being strapped into a rotating
tuning fork rig for hours on end.
"They're doing the up and the down and the spin, but your body is dictating whether you
turn left or right and they have to go with you."
Jolie later told Hello! magazine that she and co-star Sam Riley even had a near miss
while filming a flying sequence. Thankfully, though, they both made it out in one piece.
Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Looper videos about your favorite
movies are coming soon. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss
a single one.