Review of The Lion King (2019) by Thegldt — 07 Aug 2019

In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion...

Can't act because a lion has no facial expressions in real life.

2019's The Lion King is a visual masterpiece marred precisely by its ambition to be photorealistic. It's insane how each frame ofIn the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion...

Can't act because a lion has no facial expressions in real life.

2019's The Lion King is a visual masterpiece marred precisely by its ambition to be photorealistic. It's insane how each frame of this movie is computer-generated. I particularly loved the night sky timelapses that looked like they were pulled straight off a Nat Geo Wild archive.

For a movie called "The Lion King", the lions were unfortunately the weakest part of the whole thing. Don't get me wrong, they're animated majestically, but because the creative directive was to make everything look "realistic", the lions barely have any facial expression. In real life, a lion's happy face is the same as its angry face.

If the lions' faces can't do much of the acting, we now have to turn our attention on the voice talent. Donald Glover and Beyonce both have phenomenal voices—so iconic that I couldn't help but just see both music megastars in a cramped recording studio in California trying their best to deliver 25-year-old dialogue. I found Glover's voice too soft (read: cute) to sound like the grown lion portrayed in the film. And every time adult Nala was on screen, I just saw Beyonce, period. Bottom line: their voices are amazing, but their voice acting... let's just say the handicapped facial animation didn't do them any favors.

The combination of both issues (lions' photorealistic faces + recognizable voices) kept pulling me out of the magic.

So in the end, 2019's The Lion King is nothing more than a perfect Timon and Pumbaa feature. (My local cinema's reaction to those two prove that they were the highlight of this mediocre remake.