10 Recent Movies That Grossly Overestimated What Their CGI Could Do

2. The Lion King

To conclude the trifecta of visually dubious live-action Disney remakes released this year, we have Jon Favreau's The Lion King, a film that looked like a stunning recreation of the classic animation in select stills and clips...until audiences saw the entire thing for themselves.

The big problem with the remake, surprisingly enough, is the visual effects and the manner in which Favreau had opted to implement them.

The aggressively high level of photorealism ultimately creates a dual issue: it results in the actors having to tone their performances down to the point of inertia for the sake of "realism," and in the movie's more melodramatic moments - namely Mufasa's (James Earl Jones) death - causes some unintentional comedy.

There's no denying that the estimated $260 million spent on the film's CGI produced some spectacular images in isolation, but in striving so staunchly for photoreal shots, much of the animation's emotion feels clipped away and neutered.

And that is a limitation of this technology that Hollywood in general has clearly failed to appreciate.

Had The Lion King gone slightly less realistic, then some of the more heightened expressiveness of the animation could've come through without the end result plunging headlong into the uncanny valley.