Leading Hollywood animation studios Disney and DreamWorks are each releasing live-action versions of their representative animations. Disney, which has been consistently releasing live-action animations, is releasing a new film, ‘Snow White’, after the box office failure of ‘The Little Mermaid’ last year, while DreamWorks is releasing its first live-action film, ‘How to Train Your Dragon’, in theaters.

Will Disney recover from the box office failures of ‘Snow White’ and ‘The Little Mermaid’?

Disney, which has been consistently producing its representative animations, such as ‘Aladdin’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, and ‘The Lion King’, as live-action films under the name of ‘live-action’, will release ‘Snow White’, a live-action adaptation of the 1937 animation ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, in March. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ is a monumental work, being Disney‘s first feature-length animation and the world’s first full-color theatrical animation, so expectations for this film are also high.

Furthermore, since ‘The Little Mermaid’, which featured a black protagonist different from the original animation last year, failed at the box office amid mixed reactions, the success or failure of ‘Snow White’ has become even more important. However, ‘Snow White’ has also caused a lot of controversy even before its release, as it cast Rachel Ziegler, a brown-skinned Latina actress, as the main character Snow White, whose signature characteristic is ‘snow-white skin’.

Following ‘Snow White’, Disney also plans to release ‘Lilo & Stitch’, a live-action adaptation of the 2002 animation of the same name, sometime this year. The trailer was released at the ‘Super Bowl’, the final event of the NFL, the American Football League, famous for its expensive advertising costs, and became a hot topic.

Oh, how about ‘How to Train Your Dragon’, DreamWorks‘ first live-action animation film?

DreamWorks, another major Hollywood animation studio that produced ‘Shrek’, ‘Kung Fu Panda’, and ‘Madagascar’, will also be jumping into the ‘animation live-action war’ by releasing its first live-action animation film ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ in June.

‘How to Train Your Dragon’ is a work that depicts the friendship and adventure of the legendary dragon Toothless and the Viking boy Hiccup. The animated trilogy released from 2010 to 2019 was not only recognized for its artistic quality by being nominated for the Academy Award four times, but also recorded a huge global box office revenue of 1.6 billion dollars (about 2.3083 trillion won).

The direction of this film was taken by director Dean DeBlois, who directed all three animated films. Director DeBlois said in an interview with foreign media outlets that he was confident in “maintaining the best story while also making the character relationships richer and deeper.”



Reporter Seungmi Lee smlee@donga.com

This article is automatically translated using Google AI. If you notice any inaccuracies, please let us know at allkstar@donga.com.