Once you have some experience doing something, you get better at it. In this case, the people who worked on Jungle Book also worked on Lion King - so they got better at what they do. It can work to your benefit, though, like it did with this one.

The trouble with doing this type of work is that when you start on a film, it’s a couple years’ process, and by the time you finish it, there’s all new stuff that’s been improved or become the new standard, but you’re stuck with what you started with. Robert Legato: So many things were perfected that we had just started on with Jungle Book. What have been some of the biggest changes in your approach and the tools available to you since working on that film? Disney Digital Trends: It’s been a few years since you worked on The Jungle Book.

The Lion King is one of five films contending for an Academy Award in the “Best Visual Effects” category this year. The film’s visual effects team was tasked with making an entire cast of photo-realistic CG animals talk - and occasionally sing - their way through Simba’s story, and was led by three-time Academy Award winner Robert Legato.ĭigital Trends spoke to Legato about his work on The Lion King, which not only brought him back to an animal-centric feature after winning an Oscar for 2017’s The Jungle Book, but also had the filmmakers and cast rely heavily on an immersive, virtual-reality environment to make a familiar tale feel new again. Disney is no stranger to reinventing its most popular properties, and that’s exactly what the studio did with 2019’s The Lion King, a remake of the 1994 feature of the same name that swapped traditional animation for a photo-realistic, computer-generated environment and animal characters.ĭirected by Jon Favreau, the film follows a young lion cub named Simba who must embrace his destiny as ruler of the land and avenge the murder of his father.

Download the making of lion king 2019