Over the last couple years, Disney has made a habit of remaking its animated classics as live-action films, with some of its most recent efforts consisting of “Maleficent,” “Cinderella,” “The Jungle Book” and last year’s “Beauty and the Beast.” All have proved to be financial juggernauts by capitalizing on millennial’s nostalgia for the original properties, despite not really doing anything new with them.

Next year is set to be another tremendous year for Disney, as its roster for live-action remakes consists of three tremendous efforts from three directors with a lot of weight to each of their names: “Dumbo,” directed by Tim Burton (“Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children”), “Aladdin,” directed by Guy Ritchie (“King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword”) and “The Lion King,” directed by Jon Favreau (“The Jungle Book”). The interesting thing is, while all three of these are being pitched as live-action films, only two of them are actually fulfilling the traditional idea of live-action.

The idea behind a live-action adaptation of a property that was animated is usually to translate the material across to a new generation in a way that looks and feels different aesthetically while still maintaining the themes and feel of the original. This usually consists of utilizing actual sets and actors as opposed to hand-drawn ones, or in this case, computer-generated ones. CGI has been at the forefront of most blockbusters over the last decade, and this has also contributed to the rise in motion-capture performance, which consists of actors donning body suits, having CG animation constructed around them in post-production and incorporating them into the setting as something that appears real. Andy Serkis and Peter Jackson really pioneered this technique in the early 2000s with their combined effort to create the character of Gollum in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.

In bringing this back to “The Lion King” remake, one of the biggest complaints that emerged from the first teaser that dropped on Thanksgiving 2018 was that, unlike Favreau’s previous big budget CG adaptation of “The Jungle Book,” there are no human elements to this film, as “The Lion King” traditionally had no human characters in it. Therefore, with this new remake, all of the characters will be constructed through computer-generated imagery, essentially making this film just a larger, more expensive animated film. Taking out the nostalgia argument, as well as all the complaints about how this film will simply be a shot-for-shot remake of the original with nothing new to contribute to the story, this does raise several questions about what qualifies as live-action versus animated, as those lines have clearly become blurred and will continue to blur with the rise and further use of this kind of technology.