When you think back to the favorite cartoons of your youth, how often do you find yourself wishing that someone would make a live-action movie adaptation of it? I doubt the thought naturally comes up in our minds all that often apart from drunken conversations with friends and while watching movie trailers online. We don't automatically wish all the cartoons that we watched as kids were turned into movies involving actual actors portraying the various characters. But we been trained by Hollywood to respond to trailers of such movies and figure that it can't possibly be all that bad to go see it.
But time and time again, we've seen more cartoon adaptations fail at the box office. We've read scores off critics reviews panning yet another such adaptation for delivering a lousy story with paper thin characters and back story that was never provided or developed.
These days we don't just get straight-up adaptations of classic stories, but instead we get adaptations that are somehow "grittier" or "more mature" in order to draw in older crowds. We continue to participate in Hollywood's efforts to focus on more commercially viable movies with lower perceived risk (since established Intellectual Property is always better than something new, right?) instead of taking more chances with truly creative venture. I know this part sounds a little too optimistic or just plain idealist, but I'd really like to see new stuff.
To be fair, this is not to say such adaptations are automatically bad. Such stories of our youth can have pretty big emotional significance and so it only makes sense that some part of us will respond to seeing them again in any form. Such is the human experience.
So will Disney give us a live action adaptation of their Robin Hood cartoon that still involves (CGI) animals or something? Who knows, right?
Movies be crazy that way.
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