Review of The Lion King (2019) by Noahboy — 14 Sep 2019

Walking into the new Lion King, I was excited. One of my favorite childhood movies was being given the “live action” treatment, and the marketing for this film had been through the roof. However, when I left the theatre that one fateful night, I only felt disappointment, confusion, and, I have to say, rather depressed. The signs that this movie would end up being a disaster were all there: most of the trailers were shot-for-shot from the original, the Rotten Tomatoes score was, at the time, 52%, and the previous two Disney live-action remakes, Dumbo and Aladdin, were unpleasantly substandard to say the least. But this abysmal effort by the Mouse House may be the worst remake of them all, and that’s due to the main draw to this film: its visual effects.

The Lion King is a 2019 American photorealistic computer-animated movie directed by Jon Favreau, and distributed and produced by Walt Disney Pictures. It is a remake of the 1994 2-D animated movie of the same name. Donald Glover stars as Simba, a prince lion who is exiled from the Pride Lands after his uncle, Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor) kills his brother, the king (James Earl Jones), and convinces Simba that he was to fault. After reuniting with his childhood friend (Beyoncé), she persuades him to come back to the Pride and take his rightful place as king.

The Lion King was announced soon after the critical and commercial success of Favreau’s The Jungle Book (2016), which used the same technology to recreate it’s CG animals, which were realistic looking and had clear facial expressions.

It seems, however, that Disney thought it wasn’t realistic enough, because not a single animal in The Lion King expresses a shred of emotion. In the original, you can tell what each character is all about just by looking at the expressive animation, but every character in the remake shows the same expression the entire time. The CGI is also a detriment to the backdrops of the film. The iconic opening scene with vibrant, expressive colors and loud, african singing is replaced with a rather bland sunrise with heavily toned down colors and a much less loud and powerful rendition of the Academy Award nominated song, “The Circle of Life.” Speaking of songs….

Every song in this movie is poorly executed, with the choreography being bland and repetitive, and the songs having less energy than the original. While in the original, the songs were presented with bright colors and a grand, cinematic spectacle, with animals jumping and dancing from location to location, the remake just has them walking around. Two songs in particular were especially butchered: “Be Prepared” and the Academy Award winning “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.” The former was shortened down to around thirty seconds and has Scar talking in a sing-song voice, while the latter is rushed and is set during mid-day. In fact, many things seemed rushed, as the pacing in this film is erratic. While the first act seems to drag on and on, the second act seems to speed by, adding pointless side-characters that don’t get expanded upon. This makes the third act less satisfying, as we, the audience, don’t see the main character go through as much hardship. Although this film is mostly devoid of quality, there are still many things that I did like. Other than Beyoncé, whose performance is distractingly fake-sounding, the voice-work in this movie is surprisingly great, notably Seth Rogan, Billy Eichner, and Chiwetel Ejiofor who play Pumba, Timon, and Scar respectively. The sound editing is also fairly impressive, as well as the lighting, and additional scoring by Hans Zimmer. However, none of these things can even begin to save this film. The only reasons to remake a piece of entertainment are either to make it into a different language, to add your own spin on the classic tale, or to improve upon the original. The Lion King does none of these things. It’s still in english, almost every plot-point is the exact same, and the flaws of the original are still present. Three more live action remakes are on the way: Maleficent 2, Lady and the Tramp, and Mulan. While my expectations are low, I still have a shimmer of hope that they’ll at least be better than this.

3.