Mirror Stage

ou’re perfectly welcome to move on with your life, but we’re still in a state of consternation over the implications of, which pushed Disney’s practice of photo-realistic reboots ever further into the realm of the obsessive. Were there really people who were saying, “The Lion King was nice, except the animals didn’t look real enough”? More seriously, are we entering a kind of crisis of literal-mindedness that insists our animated movies must tend closer and closer to photography, and away from illustration? Not that this burgeoning brand of animation doesn’t involve its own art and craft, but the question remains whether we’re supposed to be more impressed by the fetishized technological achievement than any artistic one (no wonder many have regarded the new as somewhat lifeless). And there’s something eerie and unnerving about the mania for verisimilitude, which seems to drift away from the potential in fanciful representation—there’s a loss of the imaginative and emotional space so essential to the cinematic experience. Or maybe we’re just hopeless romantics and we should all yield to a future of dull fidelity to the real. (In other news, did we mention that biopics are generally kind of dumb?)