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Entertainment

D23 Expo reimainging, sequel, Pixar, and more news roundup

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All the Disney princesses
Photo: Olga Thompson (Walt Disney World Resort via Getty Images)

Now that another Disney+ Day has come and gone, we can get on to the meat of Disney’s big weekend: The D23 Expo, where the greatest fans in the world can get a look at the stuff they’ve already seen before but now reimagined.

Kicking off the day was Cynthia Orivio, our new Blue Fairy, who reminded the audience that there was a new version of Pinnochio currently being memory-holed on Disney+. Continuing the theme that these sorts of things were now the order of the day, Disney Studios chairman Alan Bergman took the stage to remind us that these reimaginings, such as The Lion King, Beauty And The Beast, Cinderella, and Cruella, were “iconic.” We assume he meant that the movies use “iconic imagery,” but regardless, more of these iconic reimaginings and sequels are coming down the pike.

Bergman then brought Walt Disney Studios president Sean Bailey out to take us through the upcoming ways they’re reviving old brands.

Don’t worry: Hocus Pocus 2 and Disenchanted are still coming

First up were the sequels. Hocus Pocus 2 debuts later this month, and since we already shared the trailer, we’ll move on to the other big sequel announcement: Disenchanted. Don’t get it twisted with Matt Groening’s Netflix comedy Disenchantment. This is a sequel to the wonderful Amy Adams comedy Enchanted from 2007. The whole cast is back, including Adams, Patrick Dempsey, Adele Dazeem Idina Menzel, and James Marsden. They’ve upped the ante by adding a Maya Rudolph, too. And now, there’s a trailer.

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Disenchanted lands on Disney+ on November 24, 2022.

Disenchanted | Official Trailer | Disney+

Reimagining the past is Disney’s future

The presentation was done round-robin style, with Bailey shuffling VIPs on stage for about five minutes, playing a clip, and then shuffling them off. So next up, Jude Law and the cast of Peter Pan & Wendy took the stage.

Directed by David Lowery, who directed one of the best films of 2021, The Green Knight, and Disney’s delightful remake of Pete’s Dragon, Peter Pan seems a bit more stylish than the other movies announced today. It’s still filled with nostalgic images pulled straight from the Disney vault, but also a distinct visual style, location shooting, and a fish-eye lens that won’t quit. So how will this differ from literally every other revisionist Peter Pans from the last 20 years? Those got theatrical releases.

Our new Captain Hook, Jude Law, said that this version gets into the “backstory a little more” when Peter and Hook “were once friends.” But, again, it remains to be seen how this one will differentiate itself from the numerous other Peter Pans.

Perhaps the trickiest aspect of the movie is Tiger Lily, a character that hasn’t been treated with much respect by Disney in the past. Nevertheless, newcomer Alyssa Wapanatâhk said she was very “excited to have the honor” of playing Tiger Lily. “To be able to tell the story for her, that was phenomenal for me.”

Peter Pan & Wendy [sigh] hits Disney+ next year.

After pushing Peter Pan back to Neverland, Sean Bailey introduced the trailer of The Haunted Mansion and announced that Winona Rider was joining the cast. Director (and former Disneyland employee) Justin Simin also mentioned that “according to TikTok,” Jared Leto is playing the Hatbox Ghost. We await the horror stories from his fellow castmates about how hard he tried to fit into a hatbox for the role. But really, this one is for the real Hatbox heads.

“That script was funny and filled with interesting characters, but it had a little bit of like a dark edge to it,” Simin told the crowd at D23. “I just really related to it. I felt like I knew how to make it. I felt like I understood New Orleans. And, of course, I’m a fanboy. So I felt like I understood the ride, and I felt like I got a responsibility here to make sure all the little details, all the Easter eggs are there because I’m a nerd for real.”

Bailey brought out Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins for a sneak peek of Mufasa: The Lion King. Jon Favreau’s The Lion King made over a billion dollars, so that means people liked it. However, the “live action” animation in Mufasa probably won’t convert anyone turned off by the last trip to Pride Lands. Still, then again, Barry Jenkins is very good at making movies. Here’s what Barry Jenkins said about the film:

Mufasa is the origin story of one of the greatest beings in the history of the alliance. Mufasa, all caps. It’s a story told in a few different time frames. Rafiki, Timon, and Pumbaa, who we all know and love, are relating the story of Mufasa and how he came to a very beautiful, awesome, fantastic young cub. It’s a story about how Mufasa rose to royalty. We assume he was just born into his lineage. But Mufasa was actually an orphaned cub, who had to navigate the world alone. And in telling this story, we get to experience the real journey of how Mufasa found his place and the circle of life. It is pretty awesome.

I felt I had to make this movie because when I was 14, I was helping raise two nephews. And there was a VHS tape that we watched maybe 95 times in the span of 20 days. So I really knew this character. I loved him. But then as I was reading this wonderful script, I was thinking about Mufasa and why he’s great and how people become great. And it’s crazy. I am not a king, but when I make my movies, I was on stage at the Oscars with Moonlight, and I was there and five of my best friends from college were also there. And what you are learning the story is that Mufasa is who he is. He is great because of the family and the friends he has with them. And so I saw myself in that. I thought, this is a really beautiful story to tell.

For Marc Webb’s Snow White, Gal Gadot and Rachel Zegler took the stage to show some footage. There are no dwarves yet—and seeing as they were cut from the title, who knows what their role will be. Thus far, it looks similar to the other remakes, recreating the look of the animated classic. But we’ll need to see Dopey to know how scary this thing is going to look.

Similarly, Rob Marshall invited Halley Bailey on stage to show off The Little Mermaid teaser and a clip of “Part Of Your World.” It doesn’t look like all the effects are done yet, but right now, it’s reminiscent of Avatar and the “merman” commercial from Zoolander. On the other hand, Marshall did promise four new songs from Alan Menkin and Lin Manuel Miranda, so that’s something.

Pixar on Disney+

The director of The Good Dinosaur, Peter Sohn, is back, and he brought some clips and concept art for the next Pixar movie Elemental. Sohn described the film as “very personal” and that the germ of the idea came from his parents. “We immigrated to the U.S. from Korea in the early seventies,” Sohn said. “They had no money, no family, no English. But they managed to create a life in New York.”

Similarly, Elemental files a “fire family” assimilating in Element City, “where Earth, air, water, and fire are characters in our community.”

More Pixar is coming in 2023 as we got a little more information on Win Or Lose, the studio’s first television series. The show stars Will Forte as the coach of a ragtag little league baseball team, the Pickles, and the week leading up to their big game. Each episode will focus on a different character’s perspective, allowing for various animation styles.

Pixar also announced two new features Elio and Inside Out 2, which we wrote about here.

Wait! Disney also has some cartoons to share

Disney Animation Studios will not be outdone. Today, they showed clips of their upcoming series Zootopia+ and Iwájú.

Zootopia+ is a six-part series that, like Win Or Lose, focuses on a different character and genre in each episode with various animation styles—some of which look really cool and others like Pixar.

On the other hand, Iwájú is a downright historic collaboration between Disney and an outside animation studio. Jennifer Lee, the Chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios, retold the story of how she had read about a Nigerian animation studio that was going to take down Disney. So she did like many Disney execs before her and bought the competition.

With the team from Kugali, Disney will premiere the futuristic sci-fi series Iwájú next year.

Finally, Lee brought out the cast from their upcoming 61st animated feature, Strange World. Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid, Jaboukie Young-White, and Lucy Liu star in an outer space adventure about a dysfunctional group of explorers. This one comes out on November 23.

Strange World | Teaser Trailer | Walt Disney Animation Studios

“Our film is inspired by some of the great adventure stories that we grew up with,” said co-director Don Hall. “Specifically stories about a group of explorers that stumble upon a hidden world.”

What are we most excited to discover? Jaboukie Young-White’s character, Ethan Clave, which Young-White described as “the vibe master” who makes “the vibe great.”

And that’s everything from the D23 Expo Disney Animation Studios and Pixar presentation. Check back tomorrow when Disney tries to bury us under a mountain of Star Wars and Marvel announcements.

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Entertainment

A striking take on Arthurian legend

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Rich with atmosphere and metaphor, propelled by a soundtrack of hollow strums and whispering strings, David Lowery’s The Green Knight is a kind of artisanal fantasy epic, whittling Arthurian legend into the rough shape of one of distributor A24’s arty horror mood pieces. Over two-plus hours, the film never stops dazzling the viewer with mythic imagery. During one interlude, which may be real or a vision brought on by mushrooms (the whole movie has the vibe of a psychotropic trip), pale, naked giants of almost extraterrestrial wonder lumber across the landscape. They’re amazing, in their scale and otherworldliness. Yet so is just about everything captured by Andrew Droz Palermo’s camera, affording the natural world of this medieval setting the same storybook awe framing its supernatural intrusions.

Among the film’s most remarkable attractions is its title one, who arrives like a weed bursting from cracked tile, bringing a primordial Earth-god power through the gates of Camelot. Lowery first exercises his creative liberty in the transformation of this villain of classic literature into a menace of vegetative viridescence, with a face as rough as bark and an axe that sprouts flowers when laid in the dirt. He looks fearsome, and sounds even scarier, limbs creaking and groaning with every movement, as though they were the branches of an ancient oak swayed by high winds. Brought to life with help from Peter Jackson’s Weta effects house, the Knight is a creature of uncommon tactility; you feel like you could reach out and run a hand across his corklike skin. Even the film’s digital wizardry has a handmade quality.

On paper, the Knight was green only in hue. That’s how the author, unknown to this day, described the towering challenger of his Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, and how everyone from J.R.R. Tolkien to Simon Arbitage have described him too, when translating the 14th-century poem from Middle English into modern verse. What did he represent? Whole college curriculums have been filled with theories on the matter. A staple of academic study, Sir Gawain And The Green Knight has inspired endless interpretations and thematic readings over the ages. It’s also spawned stage productions, operas, and two prior cinematic adaptations (both written and directed by Stephen Weeks, neither well remembered nor well regarded). Lowery seems drawn to the story mainly as a symbolic text. He revels in its mysteries and ambiguities and internal conflicts, like the collision of an older natural world (represented by the Knight) with the new one of the New Testament.

In shortening the title, Lowery lends it a dual meaning: The other “green” knight here is Gawain himself, played by reigning authority on plucky young strivers Dev Patel. Introduced waking in a whorehouse on Christmas morning, his Gawain is a shiftless teenage libertine caught between the implicitly pagan values of his mother (Sarita Choudhury, doing a revisionist take on the enchantress Morgan le Fay) and the explicitly Christian values of his uncle (Sean Harris, as the film’s aged, thoughtful King Arthur). It’s the young man’s insecurity about his own lack of accomplishments that inspires him to accept the challenge of the Green Knight, landing a blow that the hulking visitor will return in kind one year later. When Gawain ends up decapitating the knight, who gallops off with his own cackling noggin under one arm like the Headless Horseman, the gravity of the quid pro quo begins to sink in.

The Green Knight
Photo: A24

The following Christmas, Gawain nervously sets out on a journey to find his mysterious sparring partner and uphold his end of the bargain. Like its source material, The Green Knight has an episodic structure, but most of the episodes don’t resolve in simple or reductively instructive ways. An encounter with a deceptive thief (Barry Keoghan) on a body-strewn battlefield, for example, offers no “satisfying” closure, only the shame of defeat. Later, Gawain’s journey brings him to a castle and a hospitable host (Joel Edgerton)—one of the more significant chapters from the original text. The Green Knight complicates it, however, by casting Alicia Vikander in a dual role as both the stranger’s flirtatious wife and Gawain’s sweetheart back in Camelot. The addition of a romance in the modern sense of the word to this classic chivalric romance hints at the film’s priorities as a kind of coming-of-age story for a feckless scion. It also intrinsically ties his grasp for honor, the driving motive of the young man’s quest, to his relationship with the kind of character who rarely makes the final draft of stories bound for the libraries of history.

Legends have always been of paramount interest to Lowery, who mounted an extended tribute to a one-man Hollywood history in his last film, The Old Man And The Gun, and reached for eternity itself in his eccentric A Ghost Story. Here, the Texas writer-director revels in the opportunity to create image after image worthy of immortalization: The Green Knight is his most purely striking achievement, offering sprawling forests bathed in ghostly orange light and overhead shots that suggest the surveying eye of a curious god. Lowery shot much of the film in County Wicklow in Ireland, with scenes in a castle previously glimpsed in John Boorman’s take on Arthurian legend, Excalibur, and in another tale of a young man fumbling his way forward, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. Lowery, never shy about wearing influences on his sleeve, borrows a little from both, while nodding also to the controversial revisionism of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ and to the allegorical dread (and talking fox!) of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.

This is, in the end, a spectacle of contradictions: as grandiose as the canon of tales to which it belongs but also oddly intimate in focus, with a modern psychology that clashes productively with its squalid evocation of the far bygone yesteryear. By the end, the film’s commitment to a sustained note of woozy, remote astonishment begins to wear a little thin; one could not be blamed for desiring an Arthurian adventure that didn’t unfold in such an unbroken state of art-movie portentousness. But though Lowery resists committing to any one popular take on this anonymously penned cornerstone of world literature, instead riffing on its key motifs (that green girdle) and the centuries of discussion they’ve provoked, he does ultimately locate a relatable subversion of legend in his depiction of Gawain as a young man wrestling mightily with the consequences and responsibilities of delayed manhood. The film opens, elegantly and significantly, with a house on fire in the distance, then pulls back in the same shot, through a doorway, to find Patel slumbering in close-up, asleep while the world literally burns. Watching him finally wake up is the payoff waiting at the end of The Green Knight’s long road.

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