I figured I'd make a separate topic for this discussion. Watching the new trailer, I'm obviously incredibly excited. However, I do think that the limitations of the photorealism are increasingly apparent--primarily, I'm thinking that
a) Character models are just not able to be that distinctive. Simba, Nala, Scar, Mufasa, they've all got very differentiated designs in the original movie--you're not going to mistake them in a lineup. I'm not saying it's that bad with the CGI, but they're all notably much more similar, and if I didn't have context clues from basically encyclopedic knowledge of the first movie (as we all do here haha), I would probably be confused at times who I'm actually looking at.
b) As lots of people have brought up, emoting is difficult with CGI animals. You can be unrealistic and exaggerate in drawn models, but not so much in CGI because real animals don't laugh and grin. And when you get too close, as Gaze aptly observed, we hit uncanny valley and it actually exacerbates the issue. So I suppose voice acting becomes even more critical than it was.
Don't get me wrong, I'm excited to have more TLK content. But it is interesting to see how a more simplistic way of doing things can have such distinct artistic advantages over an infinitely more technologically involved approach. They accomplish different things, I suppose, but I think we can say subjectively (since this is all subjective) that perhaps one approach is just better than the other. At least, that's what I think. What about you all?