Intermedial negotiations between Disney’s 2D animated features and their live-action remakes: towards a hybrid of expressiveness and psychological realism

Popular commentary and marketing discourse often frame Disney’s two-dimensional (2D) animated classics and their live-action remakes as binary opposites in terms of their aesthetic modes of emotional and moral expression. The former are celebrated for their heightened expressiveness through stylized design, melodramatic performance, and setting, while the latter are associated with psychological realism, privileging nuanced performances, inner complexity, and relational depth. By drawing on the scholarship on 2D animation, film aesthetics, and narrative, this article complicates such dualistic framings. It demonstrates that the aesthetics of the two modes are not mutually exclusive but interpenetrate in significant ways. Disney live-action remakes develop their own unique expressive language through setting, voice acting, sound design, new songs, and legible animal performance, ultimately achieving an organic synthesis between psychological realism and aesthetic expression. 2D animation at times achieves subtle, psychologically realistic moments through micro-expressions, controlled gestures, and character development. These aesthetic crossovers point to a broader logic of intermediality, in which media forms borrow, infiltrate, and shape one another rather than operating in isolation. Accordingly, the relationship between medium and aesthetics should be understood not in terms of rigid binaries but as a dynamic spectrum of strategies, where Disney’s remakes and their 2D animated predecessors mutually inform, complicate, and redefine each other’s expressive and realist potentialities.