Over the last 10 years, Disney has been remaking some of its most classic and beloved animated movies into live-action films.
And however you may feel about them, it's hard to not acknowledge that they have been big box office hits.
Recently Insider put together a video showing a lot of the behind-the-scenes — well, magic — that goes into bringing these live-action Disney films to the big screen and it's fascinating:
View this video on YouTube
Like how for the upcoming live-action remake of Mulan, actor Liu Yifei trained for 3 months (6–7 hours per day) for it and did 90% of her own stunts.
Also, that cool gravity-defying fight scene we see in the trailer, it was done with wires, not CGI.
For the Jungle Book, actor Neel Sethi was alone on the set (since all the animals were CGI), but, they used puppets and hands with googly eyes for him to look at and act opposite of.
To shoot his scenes in Beauty and the Beast, Dan Stevens not only wore a motion capture suit, but also wore stilts so that he would be the correct height of the Beast.
The "One Jump Ahead" scene in Aladdin was filmed at different speeds, so Mena Massoud had to lip synch at different speeds to match his singing (sometimes faster and sometimes slower).
To shoot the flight scenes in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, they used not only traditional wires, but also two-pronged forks that were maneuvered by stunt people dressed in blue (so they can be CGI'd out).
And lastly, one surprising thing I learned was that The Lion King was actually shot like it was a live-action movie (they used virtual reality technology to film it and then added the special effects).
So there you have it, just some of ~pixie dust~ that went into bringing these movies to life.
