What These Disney Live-Action Remakes Looked Like Before Special Effects

Much has been written about Hollywood's obsession with reboots and remakes, but a quick glance at Disney's box office receipts proves that there's most definitely an appetite for them. The studio's current spate of live-action re-imaginings began in 2010 with Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. That film made over $1 billion dollars at the worldwide box office, and several more big earners would follow ⁠– Disney had raked in a whopping $7 billion from its live-action remakes by summer 2019. Not all of them have joined the billion dollar club, but the one thing that these films do have in common is that they all rely heavily on visual effects.

Remaking an animated movie with real actors becomes tricky when there are genies and dragons involved, but it's all in a day's work for the people who turn green screens and motion capture suits into fantastical landscapes and iconic characters. The original footage is often totally unrecognizable by the time the VFX department is done working its magic, and when you peel away that CGI layer, it's usually as shocking as it is funny. Here's what the Disney live-action remakes looked like before special effects were added.

Making Mowgli's animal companions behave in a realistic way was always high on the agenda, but 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. 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 creating animals that were capable of conveying emotion while still looking completely natural. "We can all relate to some things, like when a deer reacts with fright," he told Art of VFX. "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 (voiced by Idris Elba) from scratch. "Many clips of animal movements were found, recreated and then dialed into the shots," he said. "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. "It's quite powerful and I think we have the best hair/fur in the business."

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 of all time, working with motion capture-savvy actor 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, a.k.a Elliott. "With Caesar you really felt his pain and happiness, and with Elliot it's the same," Weta's Eric Saindon told The Hollywood Reporter. "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 — and unlike Smaug, another famous Weta dragon — Elliott wasn't portrayed by an actor in a motion capture suit. "We had a green wire mesh head that I would lift over my head," Saindon recounted. "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." This approach improved the performance of young star Oakes Fegley, who didn't mind acting opposite wire mesh heads and tennis balls on sticks the entire time. "It's actually kind of fun," he said.

Twitter 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. The former Fresh Prince of Bel-Air star knew he had some extremely big shoes to fill ("Robin Williams smashed this thing so hard," he told GMA) but so did the visual effects artists tasked with turning him into Disney's iconic wish-granter. "We always sort of knew it was going to be contentious, I suppose; that there would be comparisons between our Genie and the original," the remake's VFX supervisor, Chas Jarrett, told CBR. "But, ultimately, we felt confident in the character we created."

Finalizing the Genie's look wasn't easy. 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 so much like Smith. "We experimented with a broad range of more caricatured blue Genies early in pre-production," he said, but they decided that they wouldn't be making the best use of the film's biggest star with this approach. "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."

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 the 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.

"I naturally have a really small waist," James said. "I'm so healthy. I've got hips and boobs and a bum and a small waist." The actress went on to complain about all the "hypocritical" people who were, in her opinion, kicking up a big fuss over nothing. "I think all that stuff's so negative, and you've got to let it wash over your head," she said. 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. "The skirt's big and the corset pulls me in, and that's the point," James said. "That's the shape Sandy Powell created."

The hardest part of remaking Dumbo was always going to be the flying scenes. It's easy to suspend your belief for animated movies, but when you're watching a live-action film and the animals look real, that becomes a lot harder. 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. "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," MPC's animation supervisor Catherine Mullan told Animation World Network. "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" during his interview with Art of VFX – 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. "Eva Green and the children, Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins, got to ride this rig, with each wide or mid shot specially programmed," Stammers said. "On-set compositing enabled Tim to approve performances in context to the animation within minutes of each take being captured."

When the time came to create a live-action version of Alice in Wonderland, the Mouse House turned to Tim Burton. The director once worked as an animator for Disney, and the studio saw him as the perfect candidate for such an out-there production. There are a lot of weird and wonderful characters in Alice, and each one posed a unique challenge. "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," animation supervisor David Schaub told CinemaBlend.

Because the Knave of Hearts (given the name Ilosovic Stayne in the 2010 movie) 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 — he spent "several days hobbling around the set trying to get the hang of it" according to Schaub. Not that he minded. Glover was absolutely delighted when his agent informed him that Burton wanted him on board, and the process of getting ready to shoot wasn't actually that complicated. "There were no prosthetics," he said. "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. "When we started looking at the show, we knew it was going to be gigantic," Redd told Animation World Network. "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 worked with a lot of greenscreen in the first movie, so she was well used to it by the time Alice Through the Looking Glass started shooting. The major difference the second time around was that her role was a lot more physical, with more running and jumping involved. "Sustaining that level of energy and when you have quite little coming back at you in terms of the set is challenging," the Australian actor told Quirky Inspired. "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."

According to MPC's Jessica Norman, Disney wanted the latest in visual effects for 2019's Maleficent: Mistress of Evil. The studio did not, however, want to move too far away from the tone and appearance of the world it built in the first movie. 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. "The actress and the other fey characters were filmed whilst attached to operated tuning fork rigs, on a bluescreen stage," Norman told Art of VFX. "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. "You're clamped into it — like you become a piece of the machine itself, and you're working with what I think of as puppet masters," the actress said. "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. Sometimes you all go on a cue, and sometimes it goes terribly wrong." The Eternals star told Hello! magazine that she and co-star Sam Riley (Diaval) had a near miss while filming a flying sequence, but thankfully they both made it out in one piece.