Review of The Lion King (2019) by Hnestlyonthesly — 07 Oct 2019

The Lion King is maybe the worst remake so far of Disney’s campaign to hose us of our hard-earned AMC weekly subscription slots. “It looks just like a nature documentary,” my brother texted me during the (presumably empty) movie just as we were walking out of it ourselves. The problem with adapting a cartoon into an almost shot-for-shot remake with much better graphics is that much of the charm and pathos of the original is lost in the effort to represent true-to-life animal forms on screen. The CGI faces are impenetrable ciphers. It’s hard to tell what characters are feeling at any given moment. Is Simba mad? Embarrassed? Wistful? I can’t tell because his eyes convey nothing. Honestly sometimes I couldn’t tell whether I was even looking at Simba or if I was confusing him with the other little lion cub. It’s hard to tell when characters are even speaking and who they’re speaking to. There are a few disorienting moments in the first half when the mouths of characters don’t move in sync with the dialogue and it feels so **** frustrating to follow along. Is Mufasa giving a voice over or is he talking to his son in the savanna? Make up your goddamn mind, Disney. Sometimes it looks like the hippos and giraffes are singing along to I Just Can’t Wait To Be King and then other times it just looks like their jaws are hanging slack while they drink water.

I think that confusion is representative of a larger concern by the producers about the direction to take the Disney remakes. Earlier remakes have come under fire for spending too much time deviating from their source material or trying to correct the sins of the past (Jackson McHenry’s article below does a brilliant job with this). As a result, Lion King seems like it’s taken a more conservative approach, cleaving closely to the original (adding very little except Soraya’s nauseatingly unnecessary new lines: in the one the script trips over itself to explain how she can be both patrolling the borders for hyenas AND in the same shot as Simba to acknowledge that she was, indeed, just off camera doing a strong lioness’s work even though she, currently, in order for the scene to track with the original film, is not actually there. In the second added line, she needlessly tells the other lions to attack Scar long after an order need be raised). The overall effect is one in which the remake has very little to add a lot to lean on. One NPR review calls it essentially “a safari-themed karaoke video.”.

Which isn’t to say that the film is a total loss, because at the beginning you get to see the first trailer for Mulan on the big screen.

Jackson McHenry over at Vulture has some cool things to say about the way that Disney is white-washing it’s gay-coded villains in the remakes.