"Realistic" Cinema Usually Ends up Terrible

 While having conversations about realism and realistic cinema, all I've been able to think about is how more often than not films that focus on "realism" the most during film making tend to be very bad. The first example that comes to mind is the live-action Disney remakes that have been coming out pretty consistently in the last couple of years, specifically The Lion King. The main problem that most people had when leaving this movie was that the inclusion of realistic-looking CGI animals left the film feeling bland and lifeless without the whimsical nature of the original. The studio spent a large amount of their focus on trying to make the animals look and behave realistically but in doing that all of the charms of the original were lost. Nowadays in entertainment, there seems to be this growing obsession with making everything deeply rooted in reality. Animation in particular, in my humble opinion, has taken a huge blow because of this. I personally am a big fan of 2-dimensional animation but now we rarely ever get to see it. Most animation studios are now focusing on creating near-perfect replications of our real world and hyperrealism. Films like Into the Spider-verse have shown audiences the capabilities of 2D animation but the obsession with hyperrealism pushes it further into the background. While I do believe that capturing realism is important, I also believe that art benefits from the unreal and unnatural sometimes, and integral parts of storytelling do sometimes require a little abnormality to work.