We’ve all heard the complaints about how unrealistic Disney characters are. Their facial features and body proportions are all wrong, and we know it perpetuates unrealistic standards of beauty. But we still love the Disney princes and princesses because we grew up with them. But what would they look like if they were real people?
It seems like Disney is trying to answer that question, judging by the number of live-action Disney movies that are coming out lately. But an artist on Instagram that goes by the name @toyboyfan has an alternative solution.
He creates realistic portraits of Disney characters using photoshop and AI technology. He starts out with a picture of the character he wants to create and a photo of a person that resembles the character the most. Then he uses AI software to combine them.
The result isn’t always perfect. In this case, the artist takes the resulting photo and combines it with another human portrait and keeps adding more photos until it looks more or less good.
After that, he uploads the picture into photoshop and fixes everything that might look weird, adds details that will make the character recognizable.
Sometimes it just needs a bit of retouching, or changing certain colors, other times it takes a lot of photoshop to make it look real, but as you can see the results are pretty spectacular.
These character portraits look way more real than their animated originals. In fact, some of these look like living humans, very beautiful but nonetheless real.
Toyboyfan called this project “In Real Life” and he keeps creating new portraits of well-known Disney characters and uploading them to Instagram.
Every time there’s a new hyper-realistic Disney character portrait on his Instagram, he gets more requests to recreate other characters. Everyone has their favorite, so we don’t think he’ll stop any time soon. After all, people love seeing their childhood heroes come to life in such a creative way. We’ve got to say that the portraits are so pretty that we’d imagine these people to also end up as Hollywood stars.
Toyboyfan might’ve found the answer to the question of what would Disney characters look like in real life, but did this end the cycle of unrealistic expectations and beauty standards, or did it start a new one? Or perhaps it’s just a never-ending loop.
