Lion King: How VR made the impressive visuals possible

"The Lion King" divides the audience. But almost everyone agrees: the film looks damn good. And virtual reality has played its part.

The "The Lion King" remake has probably written cinema history. Jon Favreau's version has raised the visual standard for animated films to a completely new level: images from the computer have never been so realistic and a new benchmark has been set that even computer-animated individual scenes have yet to achieve.

In "The Lion King", it's not just the animals that come from the computer, but also the landscapes: grasses, rocks, clouds, virtually everything comes from the computer (except for a single shot, according to Favreau). This is so convincing that "The Lion King" was labelled a live-action film for a long time, even though nothing is real. To ensure that everything really is real, "Iron Man" director Jon Favreau used virtual reality technology.

A VR multiplayer game

As the filmmaker revealed during a talk show appearance on Jimmy Kimmel, all the digital files with nature were turned into a kind of virtual reality multiplayer game. The crew could then put on VR helmets and walk around in the created nature themselves. Steven Spielberg, among others, worked in a similar way in "Ready Player One" to explore the virtual worlds in the film himself. But here it was even more extreme and used to recreate reality. This was extremely helpful in several respects.

On the one hand, you could of course perfectly compare the Africa you had created with the real continent. Does everything fit, does the grass move correctly when you walk through it, are the proportions right, does a tree perhaps need to be moved a few metres to the left, can you run along here and so on. The speakers were also able to immerse themselves in the world that their characters inhabit.

A blessing for the cameraman

But for six-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel in particular, this was a blessing. The veteran, who has been working in Hollywood for around 40 years, was able to walk around and find out where best to "set up" the camera, which angles make the most sense - just as if he were on a real film set. And we recently explained just how important the camera is in an animated film when we reported on the role of camera god Roger Deakins in the "Taming the Dragon" series.

Visually, "The Lion King" is also so incredible because, thanks to virtual reality, it was possible to shoot an animated film like a real film and move around in real settings. Whether this also works in terms of content is another matter.

Source: filmstarts / Picture: THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY