What Makes Movies so Enjoyable?
With movies like the Lilo and Stitch remake and the live-action How To Train Your Dragon out in theaters, it’s strange how How To Train Your Dragon has received many positive reviews while Disney’s Lilo and Stitch received many negative reactions. Is it that Disney has just lost their old skill of making movies? Or perhaps is it something deeper that made Disney lose to Dreamworks?
Actors and actresses, the reason as to why movies can seem alive and human, all have one role: follow the script to what it says. The reality of making movies is that with terrible lighting, badly done costumes, and or bad acting; it all revolves the script they are given to follow. If a script calls for a clown costume on Bob, then he will wear a clown costume, and if the script says to have Felicia become an angsty teenager, then Felicia will be an angsty teenager in the film. While not everything is controlled by the script, the majority of what makes a movie good is how good the writing is.
However, how does the script play a role with big production studios? Going back to Disney and Dreamworks, what is the biggest difference between the remakes of Lilo and Stitch and How To Train Your Dragon? The answer to that question is how both movies take a different route of execution. While both movies are based on their animated counterparts, many critics have reported that Dreamworks followed the exact writing that made the original How to Train Your Dragon so popular and good. However, Disney took the original writing and made so many major changes to the original script that it was a whole different movie with the build up to the ending and how characters like Cobra Bubbles (a CIA agent-turned social worker in Lilo and Stitch) of the original Lilo and Stitch and not a brand new movie with the original movie name slapped onto it.
However, there is one important aspect of movies to take away from, which is this: as good as a script can be, many other elements must tie together with the script to make a movie good. If there is bad acting, but everything else is amazing, the movie will still be affected no matter how many changes to the script. There is no such thing as a “most important element” due to how everything is tied together to work like dominos. If one domino, representative of a bad aspect, falls, everything else falls and it just feels so much worse all because one element failed. Money is wasted in the process and the reputation of the production studio goes downhill if continued.
