Nothing but complete agreement from yours truly on this one. I cannot abide the current plague of because-we-can live action remakes of classic animated films. That this turgid trend has spread beyond Disney to Dreamworks, with the utterly superfluous live action How to Train Your Dragon, is a source of great dismay. I loved those three films for all sorts of reasons, and they work best as animation. There is not one single good artistic reason to remake them.

I am not anti-remakes when they offer a genuinely different take or improvement on something that didn't quite work (per the examples you point to herein). A good recent example is Guillermo Del Toro's hugely personal take on Pinocchio, which bears no resemblance to any previous version, including the iconic Disney animated feature.

If Disney wanted to remake, say, The Little Mermaid, rather than slavishly adhere to designs from the animated version, or include the same songs, etc, they would have been better served with an entirely different take. I'd love to have seen Del Toro's version of that story (then again, we sort-of already have that with The Shape of Water).