Plenty of people just have terrible taste. There are people out there that like Funko Pops.
I think it shows up a lot in AI slop land because it's currently not capable of producing anything that's actually good, so the whole community around that is a self-selection of people with terrible taste.
I think it has a lot to do with how Hollywood looks down on animation. Sure, they like it for kids, but they don't respect it for 'serious' films.
Same thing with SciFi, and same with Fantasy. LotR won zero Oscars, lol.
EDIT:
To be clear, I don't think people what that garbage at al. Look at how poorly the Disney remakes did.
LotR won zero Oscars
I don't mean to disagree with your main point, but LotR famously won an enormous number of Oscars. "The Return of the King holds the record for most Oscars with eleven alongside Titanic and Ben-Hur." They're some of the most awarded films in the history of the Academy Awards.
Didn't Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast clear $1 billion? Idk about the others (or what others there even are, for that matter)
edit: to clarify, I'm talking about the live action movies
My own understanding (that I refuse to research, I am lazy) is that the live action ones did numbers in China, where they aren't sick of CGI-fests that dominate modern Hollywood films
I like to believe that I'm a total peacenik, live together in common humanity with all tolerant people kinda guy, but stuff like this gives me, I think, some small window on the sort of thinking that allows for the mass violence of the European Reformation. Because normal people who see no issue at all with generative AI are alien to me. That line of thought is not only wrong, but I believe it to be actively hostile to life itself and all human endeavor. And that's ignoring the environmental issue entirely. If the situation were reversed and using generative AI somehow helped the environment I'd still be opposed to its existence.
I look upon it with revulsion and horror. The idea that we could live in a future where you never know when you pick up a book or go to see a film if you're about to see a genuine piece of human expression or a machine-hallucination that has the shape and look of art while being bereft of expression or meaning makes me want to retreat from society and live as a hermit. I'd lose my mind and become a primitivist (I already have leanings that way, but am stopped by my appreciation for modern medicine, on-demand potable water, and central heating and cooling). The way it's eating the internet is bad enough already.
The idea that we could live in a future where you never know when you pick up a book or go to see a film if you're about to see a genuine piece of human expression or a machine-hallucination that has the shape and look of art while being bereft of expression or meaning
Not trying to make you run screaming for the nearest copse, but aren't we already there? The number of times I've picked up a widely-acclaimed something only for it to turn out to be utter bullshit feels pretty high. Tons of people are writing novels and producing movies with a stunning absence of interiority because that's what'll sell, or what an algorithm has determined what will sell.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, mass culture is not in a good or healthy place right now. It’s all becoming corporate-friendly pap. And I do despair a bit every time I see the acclaim a Colleen Hoover or Sarah J. Maas book or a Star Wars sequel show or Marvel slop receive. But I see it as a bit of a Hays Code thing; even though most artists are forced to produce work under the edicts of the invisible king Capital there are enough of them who are smart enough, subversive enough to make art that is still real, beautiful, and just human. And since the current state of culture is largely the result of studios and publishers conglomerizing and then chasing bigger, safer profits I believe that eventually they will become too big, collapse under their own weight, and something else will replace them.
And of course there’s a smaller but healthier scene of lesser studios, publishers, and indies still putting out interesting stuff. Even during that brief period where Streamers were throwing money at everything resulted in some art that never would have gotten made under the regime of cable TV, though obviously that’s quickly ended up replicating the issue.
That might all sound a bit hopeful, I suppose. It is hard for those artists on the fringes eking out work, and it’s hard for those making work that’ll be allowed in by corporate gatekeepers while still being meaningful, and if the publishers and studios do collapse that’ll probably be harder still. But I think it’s possible that someday mass culture will be healthier than it is now.
I don't have high hopes for mass culture (penny dreadfuls and their descendents date back to the printing press), but true art has always thrived on the margins. AI (hopefully) won't change that, but it'll make the going harder.
There's a huge number of people who think that anything animated is automatically "for kids." So they as an "adult" will refuse to see anything animated, regardless of how much they like the movie. So when there's some live action remake of an animated movie, people flock to it, because it vaguely gestures in the direction of a movie they like but arbitrarily have decided they aren't allowed to watch.
Just look at how many people are eating up the constant remakes and remasters we get in the game industry. We live in an age of almost complete cultural stagnation and the cultural industry has managed to create a herd of consumers too dumb to even realize it, happy to continuously eat slop the rest of their lives.
There is a certain set of slop consumers who still just flatly refuse to engage with any animation at all.
One of those attributes where the act of asserting it directly puts the lie to the assertion.
I don't really see the appeal, either. They've made money hand-over-fist so clearly there's an audience for it, but idk...if I want to watch Aladdin, I'll just go watch the original and not a soulless cash-grab live action remake. I guess the question is how much of that is people clamoring for live action and how much of that is induced demand where people just go see whatever slop Disney puts out.
One thing that doesn't make sense to me (even if it does seem to be true to how the industry operates) is why live action is seen as strictly superior. It's not like the people making Aladdin or Princess Mononoke wanted to make a live action film but had to settle for animation--these were people at the very top of their field pouring all of their passion into their art! To just reproduce it in live action misses the point that it was designed for the animated medium from the ground up.
Video game remakes are a different beast, since even though there can be drastic visual or even gameplay changes, the medium is the same. There are good and bad remakes, and reasonable minds can differ over which version they prefer, but it's rare that the fundamental character of a game is completely altered. Like, obviously Pokémon FireRed is leagues ahead of Pokémon Red in terms of graphical and audio fidelity[1], features, and polish, but I also don't think it's too different from what the original team might have made if they'd had access to the GBA hardware. In sharp contrast, there is no universe in which Disney's premier animation studio randomly makes a live action film in 1992.
Also, the video game medium changes rapidly. The difference between the Gen I and Gen III Pokémon games is night and day despite only being 6 years apart, while the difference between Aladdin and The Emperor's New Groove is mostly stylistic. The worst thing you might see in an older animated movie is some rough CGI, but it's not like Alice in Wonderland has bad animation--far from it! If age plays a factor in enjoyment, it'll be more about the content of the film than the technical execution. Meanwhile, the technical fidelity and conventions of older games can pose significant challenges to modern audiences, so remakes can remove those barriers by applying a fresh paint of coat and a tune-up while still delivering the same content and core experience.
although I heavily prefer the Generation I chiptunes over the Generation III sampled instruments ↩︎
