I really love animation.

From time to time, I like to talk movies with my friends and I’m often surprised at how their top 10 lists feature very little animated films, if any at all. I guess the idea for most is that animated films are for children and lack the depth and nuance of a live-action feature. What garbage.

Animation is an expressive form of film and, when done right, leaves a much greater impact on the adults taking their kids to see the film than it does on the children themselves. One of my favorite films of all time that demonstrates this perfectly is Inside Out. That film was produced by Pixar, a familiar household name at this point, and speaks about the development of complex emotions throughout our adolescence. The film frames its narrative by personifying the different emotions in a little girl’s head. The girl in question, Riley, could be anyone. She could be me as she goes through some big changes in her life: The move to a new town and new life, leaving her old one behind. Immediately, an adult can remember a moment like that in their lives: A moment of great change and the associated emotional struggle. A mixture of excitement, at the life yet to come, and sadness, from leaving the old life behind. Exploring ideas of the sort and making a film out of it sounds like a really daunting task. Exploring the ideas, creating the movie, and completely nailing it is just cathartic. I remember being blown away that they could take a mix of emotions we probably never understood when we were younger and then explain it to us as a natural part of the human condition. That’s genius. And for me, life-changing, because it led to a lot of self-reflection.

Inside Out goes to great lengths to capture Riley’s evolving emotional spectrum, ending the film on a note that would leave the most heartless and ruthless of psychopaths shedding at least a tear while leaving the Me’s of the world visibly emotional and sad. Pixar usually knows how to strike a chord with its adult audiences while still leaving plenty of room for children to be dazzled by the animated expressiveness of the characters and the beautiful colors on screen. A movie like Inside Out is rare. It’s all the more impressive when you consider The Incredibles, Toy Story, Ratatouille, and Coco all being beautiful animated features that deal with concepts of family, childhood, ambition, and death. These aren’t light concepts that only children can enjoy. These are deep and meaningful topics that have direct impact on us. You can’t make a film like Toy Story live-action because how are you going to make talking toys seem believable while still delivering the same emotional weight your story needs? Animation can be used to deliver the stories that are outlandish enough that they can’t be real but that carry a moral or lesson that is appropriately sage and allows us to reflect on our inner self.

Disney used to do this extremely well with its flagship animation studios. The classic films we’re seeing remakes for today are as magical today as they were when we first saw them. But the live action films cannot live up to that magic. That alone should be proof of the power of animation. But I think that the best example of what I’m trying to say happened this past weekend when I watched The Lion King’s remake with my wife. She hated it. Which surprised me because she liked the Aladdin remake, which I hated.

I don’t remember much of the original The Lion King. I remember my little brain didn’t like seeing animals talking and I was more a fan of seeing human characters, even in my cartoons. I was more of a Dexter’s Laboratory and Detective Conan (Space Toon Generation, baby) child than I was a Cow and Chicken and Sheep in the City child. Animals, thought my pea brain, should just be animals. My only exception to this rule, I think, was the beautiful 101 Dalmatians. My taste has changed over time, of course, but I never really got around to watching The Lion King again and just kept re-watching the films I loved as a child: Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Tarzan, Cinderella, and some others.

So when we walked into The Lion King, I was pleasantly surprised. The animals looked incredible, and while the voice acting fell flat in some areas (Beyoncé could have been better), the writing was mostly great. If I had to complain, it would be that the animals were not too expressive and there was one comment from Pumba about how he would overcome his bullies that felt so out of place that it just came off as stupid. Honestly, I thought that whole bully set-up and Pumba’s quick resolution to that problem was just a throwaway piece of modern propaganda. Lazy. I’ll ignore it.

All things considered, though, I liked the movie. It was a good time. The songs were good. My brain definitely reconnected some neurons when I heard I Just Can’t Wait to Be King thunder through the theater. But I knew something was missing. Where was that Disney magic? My wife was clearly not amused and, similar to my take on Aladdin, thought that The Lion King remake trampled all over the beautiful and much more expressive animated original.

So this morning, on my long drive to work, I opened up YouTube and watched a clip from the original. The clip was the same song, I Just Can’t Wait to Be King, but from the animated original and oh my God. That, alone, was so much more beautiful than anything from the remake. Nala hops around like a happy little girl, Simba emotes like a boy that’s pretending to be larger than life and we’re all just playing along, Zazu holds up a pyramid of animals with Simba and Nala at the top. The background is suddenly shaded in stylistic colors that gives the whole song a trippy vibe. The animation and artistry on display trumps anything that a realistic setting could evoke in a film like this. The animals are beautifully personified and have that trademark Disney bounce and flow perfected in Tarzan. And this could be just me but the song has more oomph to it in the original. I don’t know what it is but coupled with the cartoon, the song has more soul than the remake’s version. That clip alone is so much better than anything else that I saw in the live action remake that I’m going to have to update my memory on the animated original.

In a film like the original The Lion King, an animal can express itself like a human would. And since we’re already being ridiculous with letting animals talk, grounding the animal in reality leaves something to be desired because the clearly fantastical element is trying very hard to work in a real world setting. This isn’t magical anymore. Imagine taking the emotions in Riley’s head from Inside Out and turning the whole movie into a live-action one. It just doesn’t work. How are you going to allow the emotions the same breathing room that they are allowed in a cartoon? You can’t.

If I may rant a bit: One of the most iconic scenes in Aladdin is the genie’s Friend Like Me sequence: A beautiful explosion of color that stretches and morphs the genie in fun ways as he sells you on the idea of having a friend like him. It’s bonkers. When watching the remake, that entire sequence fell flat for me because how are you going to stretch Will Smith, a human being, into a fire-breathing dragon whose fire turns into belly-dancers? It all just felt very uncanny and ended up looking disingenuous. Another weird thing was Jaafar holding an actual staff in the remake. I mean that’s just dumb. Real people don’t hold staffs that magically hypnotize people. They could’ve made it into a spell or something, it didn’t have to be a staff.

Also, something to piss off the masses: Jaafar and Jasmine get married in the least Arabic way imaginable. I mean, there’s a priest-like person holding what is probably a Qur’an and asks, “do you take Jasmine to be your lawfully wedded wife?” What?! Are these people joking? How do you get away with this?

I really love animation. Disney is really kicking me while I’m down with these awful remakes. And yet, I have to watch them in hopes that they’ll probably be good. I mean sure, they fooled me with The Lion King. But it only took a short clip to realize that they won’t fool anyone for long.

Some stories are best told as cartoons and best kept as cartoons.