5 ms·

The title is a bit misleading because the changes weren't to the movies themselves but to the sources during adaptation. The subtle difference is that none of t

by dagmx 6y ago

The title is a bit misleading because the changes weren't to the movies themselves but to the sources during adaptation. The subtle difference is that none of these were in the films script in pre production so weren't changes to the film in production, with the exception of fantasia. Having worked in the animated film industry for a while, there's so much that does get changed in both pre production and production that people don't hear about. Some of the best received animated films have been stinkers internally until something clicks. Whether that's rewriting a critical character a few months from delivery to throwing out entire sequences. Similarly many poorly received films were great in production but after focus testing and suits getting involved, they get diluted down. Sometimes entire finished sequences get cut leaving the remaining shots from making sense to an audience. Film making is a very organic process, sometimes good and sometimes not. There's this Illusion in public that what the public sees is the directors initial vision. But largely it's the work of hundreds of people, morphing over time to try and find what will be right.

msla 6y ago
> There's this Illusion in public that what the public sees is the directors initial vision. But largely it's the work of hundreds of people, morphing over time to try and find what will be right. Critics can have this illusion, too: Auteur theory posits that films have an author, that author being the director, and you can see that director's style manifest in the films they make. Sometimes, sure, this is obvious: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino... they all made or make films with a distinctive stamp on them. Where this theory runs aground is where your comment comes in, filmmaking as a collaborative process. Citizen Kane was, for example, definitely a collaboration among at least three people: Welles, Mankiewicz, and Toland, the director, screenwriter, and cinematographer, respectively. They each contributed to the film as a finished product, a thing of words and images. And then there's the failure of the auteur: Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau, people who had creative control through working outside the Hollywood system and, frankly, blew it. Plan 9 From Outer Space might be the Citizen Kane of laughably bad science fiction films, but it's not the Citizen Kane of films. To make a baseball analogy, Wood tried hard, had plenty of heart, got up there, swung for the fences... and spun around like a top a few times before landing flat on his face, never even whiffing the ball. There's a reason Burton made a sensitive film about him and his efforts.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I forget where I read this but... A lot of mediocre or even actively bad filmmaking out there involves people mostly going through the motions for a check. Wood, by all accounts, was genuinely passionate about making movies. He and his cast of associates just were really bad at it.
- wincy 6y ago
  I think one of the most noticeable examples of this is the original Star Wars trilogy versus the prequels. With the original trilogy, people were constantly telling George Lucas that an idea was dumb, or that he should tweak or change something, remove characters, etc. Marcia Lucas, his now ex-wife, won an Academy Award for Best Film Editing in the 70s, and edited the original Star Wars trilogies. However, twenty years later when the legendary Lucas walked out on set with the script for Episode 1, he was met with raucous applause, after all this was THE George Lucas, he could do no wrong. Not having anyone to point out that your ideas aren’t good is what gets us the Star Wars prequels and their ponderous, meandering political plot lines and lameness.
  - nercht12 6y ago
    Hey, I thought Episode 1 was good. It was the only prequel that could stand on its own as a complete story. The others were "Oops, I forgot to plan this out better so let's just add a ton of fighting and action to hide that fact".
    - riffraff 6y ago
      I really enjoyed Episode 1 when it came out, but it has some seriously... err.. controversial things, starting with the whole midichlorian thing and finishing with the over choreographed lightsaber fights[0]. The "Lucas can do no wrong" feels pretty present there too. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0mUVY9fLlw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0mUVY9fLlw
082349872349872 6y ago
Being a fan of the books, it was nice to see the soviet Winnie the Pooh cartoons (винни пух), because they hewed closer to Milne. I haven't seen their Mary Poppins yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't closer to Travers' story, either. "Wind of Change" (Ветер перемен) in soviet russia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbXX0Wu34f8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbXX0Wu34f8 Edit: happy belated Tag der Deutschen Einheit to our german HN'ers!
Kye 6y ago
It's been an experience seeing all the movies I watched first on TV uncut on streaming services. "Edited for content and length" understates the changes they make. It's not exactly the same, but it gives a sense of how much editing affects a movie.
- draugadrotten 6y ago
  What made me understand the power of editing was the Top Gun Recut trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA
  - wmeredith 6y ago
    Editing is everything. It literally is what turns footage into cinema. Otherwise you’re just watching a documentary of people playing dress up and pretend. That’s why there was such an outcry recently when the Academy discussed movie the Oscar for Best Editing out of the main broadcast and into the second tier awards they do off the air. It makes sense when you come at it with the mindset that no one cares about editors. But much less so when you actually understand cinematography and movie making.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    I've been thinking a lot about the distinction between facts and narrative. This puts a rainbow-coloured bow on it. Facts are events. Narrative is the relationships between those events. Unconnected data vs. an interconnected graph, individual nodes vs. integrated network. It's possible to take the same facts (or a small sample of them, as here) and create an entirely different story. Or at least the appearance of one. A recut trailer might be sustained by recutting the film as a whole, or not. The Maverick-Iceman romance ... probably ... wouldn't be sustained without a fair bit of extra (or previously cut) footage, but there's definitely enough to cast a trailer-length spell. Good narratives address more of the facts, concisely and with few contradictions, loose ends, or holes Something often missing even in officially released films.
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
interestica 6y ago
So "Shrek" as "the Gulag" is real? > "It was known as the Gulag,” one animator told author Nicole Laporte. “If you failed on ‘Prince of Egypt’ [a DreamWorks movie that later flopped], you were sent to the dungeons to work on ‘Shrek.’ ” https://nypost.com/2010/05/16/ugly-green-montrous/ https://nypost.com/2010/05/16/ugly-green-montrous/
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  I'm surprised to hear Prince of Egypt described as a flop - https://m.the-numbers.com/movie/Prince-of-Egypt-The https://m.the-numbers.com/movie/Prince-of-Egypt-The suggests it made $140M profit from a $60M stake. I could cope with making a flop like that!
  - mamon 6y ago
    It's all relative. Shrek made $487M internationally, on the same $60M budget. And it also started a franchise that grossed over $2B
tzs 6y ago
> Having worked in the animated film industry for a while, there's so much that does get changed in both pre production and production that people don't hear about. I wonder what some of the biggest changes to happen in production are? One of the biggest I've read about is How to Train Your Dragon. The book series is aimed at kids around 10 years old. The main characters, such as Hiccup, are around that age. The vikings are not at war with the dragons, and many vikings have dragons as pets, mounts, and hunting aids. Toothless is in the books, but he is not a Night Fury--those do not exist in the book universe. He's just a common garden dragon (their model became the Terrible Terrors in the movies), named Toothless because he lost his teeth. The big issue in the first book is a rite of passage where kids have to train a dragon or be exiled. Toothless offends another dragon during this, a big fight breaks out, this is seen as a failure of training, and Hiccup and the other kids also undergoing the rite are going to be exiled. They were 3 years into production of a very faithful following of the book, with large parts animated and most of the dialog recorded, when they realized they were going to end up with a "drop off" movie. Kids around 10 would love it...but their parents or their older siblings who had taken the kids to the theater would not be interested. They would just drop the kids off at a mall theater and go hang out at the food court or shop or something until time to pick the kids up. Making a drop off movie is fine if you don't spend a lot of money on it. HTTYD was a $160+ million movie, though, and no way can a drop off movie come anywhere near making that back, let alone profit. So one year before it was supposed to be released, they put "The Croods" on hold and moved Chris Sanders from that to take over as director of HTTYD, with the task of coming up with a completely new story...and they didn't move back the release date. Sanders brought in Dean DeBlois, who had been his writing/directing partner on "Lilo & Stitch" when they were both at Disney, to be co-writer/co-director. They made the kids 15 instead of 10, created the viking/dragon war, added Astrid and Ruffnut, created Night Furies and upgraded Toothless to one. They needed a lot of new models, new settings, and mostly new dialog.

by dagmx 6y ago

msla 6y ago

> There's this Illusion in public that what the public sees is the directors initial vision. But largely it's the work of hundreds of people, morphing over time to try and find what will be right. Critics can have this illusion, too: Auteur theory posits that films have an author, that author being the director, and you can see that director's style manifest in the films they make. Sometimes, sure, this is obvious: Hitchcock, Kubrick, Tarantino... they all made or make films with a distinctive stamp on them. Where this theory runs aground is where your comment comes in, filmmaking as a collaborative process. Citizen Kane was, for example, definitely a collaboration among at least three people: Welles, Mankiewicz, and Toland, the director, screenwriter, and cinematographer, respectively. They each contributed to the film as a finished product, a thing of words and images. And then there's the failure of the auteur: Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau, people who had creative control through working outside the Hollywood system and, frankly, blew it. Plan 9 From Outer Space might be the Citizen Kane of laughably bad science fiction films, but it's not the Citizen Kane of films. To make a baseball analogy, Wood tried hard, had plenty of heart, got up there, swung for the fences... and spun around like a top a few times before landing flat on his face, never even whiffing the ball. There's a reason Burton made a sensitive film about him and his efforts.

ghaff 6y ago
I forget where I read this but... A lot of mediocre or even actively bad filmmaking out there involves people mostly going through the motions for a check. Wood, by all accounts, was genuinely passionate about making movies. He and his cast of associates just were really bad at it.
wincy 6y ago
I think one of the most noticeable examples of this is the original Star Wars trilogy versus the prequels. With the original trilogy, people were constantly telling George Lucas that an idea was dumb, or that he should tweak or change something, remove characters, etc. Marcia Lucas, his now ex-wife, won an Academy Award for Best Film Editing in the 70s, and edited the original Star Wars trilogies. However, twenty years later when the legendary Lucas walked out on set with the script for Episode 1, he was met with raucous applause, after all this was THE George Lucas, he could do no wrong. Not having anyone to point out that your ideas aren’t good is what gets us the Star Wars prequels and their ponderous, meandering political plot lines and lameness.
- nercht12 6y ago
  Hey, I thought Episode 1 was good. It was the only prequel that could stand on its own as a complete story. The others were "Oops, I forgot to plan this out better so let's just add a ton of fighting and action to hide that fact".
  - riffraff 6y ago
    I really enjoyed Episode 1 when it came out, but it has some seriously... err.. controversial things, starting with the whole midichlorian thing and finishing with the over choreographed lightsaber fights[0]. The "Lucas can do no wrong" feels pretty present there too. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0mUVY9fLlw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0mUVY9fLlw

082349872349872 6y ago

Being a fan of the books, it was nice to see the soviet Winnie the Pooh cartoons (винни пух), because they hewed closer to Milne. I haven't seen their Mary Poppins yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't closer to Travers' story, either. "Wind of Change" (Ветер перемен) in soviet russia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbXX0Wu34f8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbXX0Wu34f8 Edit: happy belated Tag der Deutschen Einheit to our german HN'ers!

Kye 6y ago

It's been an experience seeing all the movies I watched first on TV uncut on streaming services. "Edited for content and length" understates the changes they make. It's not exactly the same, but it gives a sense of how much editing affects a movie.

draugadrotten 6y ago
What made me understand the power of editing was the Top Gun Recut trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekXxi9IKZSA
- wmeredith 6y ago
  Editing is everything. It literally is what turns footage into cinema. Otherwise you’re just watching a documentary of people playing dress up and pretend. That’s why there was such an outcry recently when the Academy discussed movie the Oscar for Best Editing out of the main broadcast and into the second tier awards they do off the air. It makes sense when you come at it with the mindset that no one cares about editors. But much less so when you actually understand cinematography and movie making.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  I've been thinking a lot about the distinction between facts and narrative. This puts a rainbow-coloured bow on it. Facts are events. Narrative is the relationships between those events. Unconnected data vs. an interconnected graph, individual nodes vs. integrated network. It's possible to take the same facts (or a small sample of them, as here) and create an entirely different story. Or at least the appearance of one. A recut trailer might be sustained by recutting the film as a whole, or not. The Maverick-Iceman romance ... probably ... wouldn't be sustained without a fair bit of extra (or previously cut) footage, but there's definitely enough to cast a trailer-length spell. Good narratives address more of the facts, concisely and with few contradictions, loose ends, or holes Something often missing even in officially released films.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago

interestica 6y ago

So "Shrek" as "the Gulag" is real? > "It was known as the Gulag,” one animator told author Nicole Laporte. “If you failed on ‘Prince of Egypt’ [a DreamWorks movie that later flopped], you were sent to the dungeons to work on ‘Shrek.’ ” https://nypost.com/2010/05/16/ugly-green-montrous/ https://nypost.com/2010/05/16/ugly-green-montrous/

pbhjpbhj 6y ago
I'm surprised to hear Prince of Egypt described as a flop - https://m.the-numbers.com/movie/Prince-of-Egypt-The https://m.the-numbers.com/movie/Prince-of-Egypt-The suggests it made $140M profit from a $60M stake. I could cope with making a flop like that!
- mamon 6y ago
  It's all relative. Shrek made $487M internationally, on the same $60M budget. And it also started a franchise that grossed over $2B

tzs 6y ago

> Having worked in the animated film industry for a while, there's so much that does get changed in both pre production and production that people don't hear about. I wonder what some of the biggest changes to happen in production are? One of the biggest I've read about is How to Train Your Dragon. The book series is aimed at kids around 10 years old. The main characters, such as Hiccup, are around that age. The vikings are not at war with the dragons, and many vikings have dragons as pets, mounts, and hunting aids. Toothless is in the books, but he is not a Night Fury--those do not exist in the book universe. He's just a common garden dragon (their model became the Terrible Terrors in the movies), named Toothless because he lost his teeth. The big issue in the first book is a rite of passage where kids have to train a dragon or be exiled. Toothless offends another dragon during this, a big fight breaks out, this is seen as a failure of training, and Hiccup and the other kids also undergoing the rite are going to be exiled. They were 3 years into production of a very faithful following of the book, with large parts animated and most of the dialog recorded, when they realized they were going to end up with a "drop off" movie. Kids around 10 would love it...but their parents or their older siblings who had taken the kids to the theater would not be interested. They would just drop the kids off at a mall theater and go hang out at the food court or shop or something until time to pick the kids up. Making a drop off movie is fine if you don't spend a lot of money on it. HTTYD was a $160+ million movie, though, and no way can a drop off movie come anywhere near making that back, let alone profit. So one year before it was supposed to be released, they put "The Croods" on hold and moved Chris Sanders from that to take over as director of HTTYD, with the task of coming up with a completely new story...and they didn't move back the release date. Sanders brought in Dean DeBlois, who had been his writing/directing partner on "Lilo & Stitch" when they were both at Disney, to be co-writer/co-director. They made the kids 15 instead of 10, created the viking/dragon war, added Astrid and Ruffnut, created Night Furies and upgraded Toothless to one. They needed a lot of new models, new settings, and mostly new dialog.