Review of Lady and the Tramp (2019) by Ajzeg01 — 13 Feb 2020

I did it! I watched all the live-action Disney remakes of 2019! Well, except for that Maleficent sequel. I guess I’m not quite done yet. Darn. Anyway, Lady and the Tramp! Before watching the remake, I rewatched the original for the first time since I was a kid.

I have to say, it might be one of my favourite Disney films! It’s way better than I remember! For a movie about something so simple, it’s pretty much just about dogs being dogs, they put in a lot of artistry, great writing and great voice acting! As for the remake, well, first of all, let me address the elephant in the room.

You guys may have never heard of this remake. That’s because they released it straight to Disney+. It never had a theatrical run. However, this movie does not have Disney Channel Original Movie-level production value like you might expect.

It actually looks like something that could’ve been in theatres, I was impressed! It accurately captures the look of the original with a lot of colour and the CGI is decent. It’s not as technically impressive as The Lion King, but I thought the animal characters in this were a lot more expressive than in that movie.

It still looks weird sometimes and it can’t hold a candle to the original animation, but it helps that dogs are just naturally very expressive animals. Also, they sometimes swap them out for real dogs.

The voice acting I thought was quite good and the songs, though few there are, are good. They don’t get butchered like in the other remakes, even though it suffers from the Lion King problem of sometime recycling the exact same recordings and cutting out one of the most memorable songs.

However, with all that said, this movie sucks. It still suffers from the same problems as the other remakes, it’s the exact same movie just in live-action. It adds some stuff here and there and it changes stuff here and there, but it’s still beat-for-beat the exact same movie.

Again, what is the point of watching this when the original is up on the exact same damn streaming service, right there, ready to watch? It’s not like you get the experience of seeing the story and songs on the big screen, like with the other remakes.

This movie was never in theatres! It has even less of a reason to exist! While the voice acting is good, the human acting just felt odd. They act modern and say modern things while in an early-20th century setting, but they also keep some of the original dialogue.

It doesn’t really mix well. Speaking of, this movie does try to make the story more “woke” and politically correct by diversifying the cast and taking out some of the more problematic and dated elements from the original, like the gender roles and racial stereotypes.

While that’s all well and good, they didn’t update the setting. Lady and the Tramp is a timeless story. It could be set in any time period, but they chose to set it in the same time as the original but with a modern-day lens, which, again, feels weird.

It’s not like diversifying a fantasy setting, or even Dumbo, which took place in a circus. Lady and the Tramp was set in a very specific period in recent American history, a time period that wasn’t so great for women, minorities and people of colour.

I don’t know, isn’t it kind of more problematic to pretend that everything was good for everyone and everyone got along just fine? I know it’s a Disney movie, looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses is kind of their thing, but it’s 2020.

I don’t think sugarcoating history is really acceptable anymore. It definitely should’ve been set in modern-day. This movie also doesn’t seem to understand the stylistic choices of the original.

The original was shot from a dog’s eye view, you rarely saw any human faces. It was also written from a dog’s perspective and from their understanding of the world around them. There are WAY too many scenes with just humans in this movie, and the dogs understand humans just a little too well in this.

It loses a lot of what made the original so unique and special. Overall, while not quite as bad as Aladdin or The Lion King, or even Beauty and the Beast (which I haven’t seen but can guess that it sucks too), it’s still a complete and utter waste of time.

Don’t bother with this one. Just watch the original, which is shorter and better.