The flurry of recent live action Disney remakes featuring animals have all been centered around impressive life-like computer generated effects. The Lion King, The Jungle Book and Dumbo all have their titular hero animals completely rendered in a computer. But SlashFilm has just revealed that the Lady and The Tramp remake will break that trend, instead using real life dogs. Collider revealed that the film is going to be released exclusively on Disney+ with no word if there will be a limited release in theaters.
Collider also interviewed Thomas Mann (Me and Earl and The Dying Girl, Kong: Skull Island, Project X) who will playing the owner of Lady, Jim Dear. Mann stated:
“I really think it’s an enhanced version of the world that you saw before. Obviously, the human characters are a little more flushed out. They’re not these passing faces that you barely get a glimpse of. You get to know them a little bit better. And also, there are real dogs. Who doesn’t want to see two real dogs kiss over a plate of spaghetti? That is the main draw for me. You get the charisma of real dogs in there.”
Based off the description provided by Mann, the movie seems very similar to live action family pet movies, such as the Air Bud movies and Charlotte’s Web. Mann also stated:
“The dogs were there. We shot with the dogs, every day. They were on set and they weren’t even trained. They found these dogs and started training them about three months before. They just wanted to find the perfect dogs. The main dog’s name was Rose, who played Lady. It was crazy because they didn’t know they were working, so they would run off in the middle of a take, and then come back over. You have to be extra patient because you have to be good every time for when they are good once. It was a lot of fun. It was so cute, every day, to just have a bunch of dogs to play with. It made the job a lot less stressful.”
The remake seems to be an extremely interesting take on the classic animated film and it would be extremely fascinating to learn about the various tactics that they are going to use to recreate the classic scenes everyone loves.