Live-action remakes of classic animated Disney projects are no new phenomena. Dating back to 1994’s “The Jungle Book,” the studio has attempted to, with mixed results, double dip into their history. But it wasn’t until 2016’s second attempt at remaking their beloved Kipling adaptation that the advances in CGI technology made it so that no project could be too ambitious to spin the block on. This reviewer distinctly remembers grumbling through a press screening of that Jon Favreau-directed “Jungle Book” and snarking to his plus one about how eager the House of Mouse must be to give this same treatment to “The Lion King.” Three years and one monkey’s paw curl later, 2019’s “The Lion King” felt like a colossal waste of time.
Sure, audiences got a new collection of Beyoncé songs (as well as her visual companion piece “Black is King”), but what did this latest telling of the beloved tale yield outside of $1.6 billion at the global box office? All of these remakes that folks call “live-action” are still primarily animated, albeit eerie, and photorealistic.
In every one of these outings, the exaggerated, cartoon approach to singing and talking animals anthropomorphized into relatable characters is replaced with the uncanny valley of watching a David Attenborough nature documentary with dubbed-over dialogue and musical numbers.
Much craft and attention to detail are on display to make the animals feel as life-like as possible.
But “real” or “believable” means nothing without emotional connection. Disney has made trillions off how easy it is for a child to form an emotional connection with a cartoon animal possessing enormous, unrealistic eyes. With this new approach, the result is always a financial success with fleeting cultural relevance. Everyone will take their families out to see a new, shiny, 8K-OLED-HDR-TV-in-the-display-section-of-the-Best-Buy version of the cartoon classics they loved as kids. But once they’ve been subjected to something twice as long and half as resonant, they forget the experience entirely…until there’s a new one.
Enter Barry Jenkins. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker responsible for “Moonlight” had used his newfound critical cache to adapt James Baldwin (“If Beale Street Could Talk”) and Colson Whitehead (Amazon’s excellent series “The Underground Railroad”) and had since reached that zenith all up-and-coming directors reach where they must take a meeting with Disney and get offered their obligatory Marvel or Star Wars project. For whatever unknowable reason, Jenkins chose to take on a sequel to “The Lion King” that would be pitched as “The Godfather Part II” with animals.
The film was initially reported to split its runtime between continuing the story of Simba (voiced by Donald Glover) and flashbacks to a young Mufasa (Aaron Pierre taking over from the late James Earl Jones.) But after Jones’s passing, it seems that the story hewed closer to the prequel side of things, eschewing the Don/Michael Corleone split for a straightforward framing device where Simba’s daughter Keira (Blue Ivy Carter) is told about grandfather’s origins. This allows the narrative to center around the relationship between Mufasa and his brother Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who would grow up to be the villainous Scar.
There is something admirable in watching a filmmaker of Jenkins’s caliber try to will a worthwhile motion picture into existence within an otherwise lifeless paradigm. And there are small successes to be found for those with the patience to search for them.
There is something admirable in watching a filmmaker of Jenkins’s caliber try to will a worthwhile motion picture into existence within an otherwise lifeless paradigm. And there are small successes to be found for those with the patience to search for them. While still not particularly distinct, the character designs of the animals themselves allow for more emoting and subtlety. This is highlighted by Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton’s propensity for portraiture within the fame, bringing the “camera” close enough to each lion’s face that the emotional distance between the subject and the viewer begins to melt away.
This is best shown when exploring the precarious brotherhood between Mufasa and Taka. The show-stopping tunes penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda try hard to hammer home the more significant ideas and feelings, but Jenkins allows for quieter moments between these two cubs thrust together by tragedy to do the real heavy lifting. In the most touching moment in the picture, Taka, a young prince, tries to take Mufasa into his family after a flood separates him from his people. Taka’s father, Obasi (Lennie James) insists that Mufasa must race Taka for the opportunity. But as Mufasa falls behind, exhausted from traveling through this catastrophe, Taka modulates his pace, telling his new friend, “I’ve always wanted a brother.”
There are other ideas at play here, with Mufasa unintentionally usurping Taka’s role in the pride and ultimately ascending to being a uniter of the various species. But much of that feels muddled by how big the cast grows and how tedious Timon and Pumba’s (Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner) interruptions feel. It becomes quite clear, in quick succession, that Jenkins’s ambition cannot combat the doomed nature of this endeavor. Despite being gifted young actors, Pierre and Harrison Jr. aren’t particularly strong voice performers. The most enticing element here, the idea of seeing Scar become Scar, is instantly nerfed when Harrison Jr. arbitrarily starts making a truly reprehensible Jeremy Irons impression the moment he’s done performing a song about betraying Mufasa, as if he had the idea to sound more villainous after crossing the chorus.
But even setting aside these gripes, “Mufasa: The Lion King” is a two-hour film that repeatedly devolves into an overactive desktop wallpaper.
But even setting aside these gripes, “Mufasa: The Lion King” is a two-hour film that repeatedly devolves into an overactive desktop wallpaper. The sweeping vistas and majestic images of tenderly rendered animals ought to be something to behold, but it feels so repetitive and looks so inert that you would be hard-pressed to differentiate it from one of those new AI models that creates smooth enough video from paragraph-long prompts.
If someone of Jenkins’s pedigree can’t, with all this budgetary power behind him, best some poster on Elon Musk’s X typing “lions fight on mountaintop epic” into Sora, then Hollywood is truly cooked, and there’ll be nothing stopping the fools who think generative AI can usurp traditional filmmaking methods. At this rate, they’re already bent to the will of short-sighted studio groupthink to the point of obsolescence.
“Mufasa: The Lion King” is currently playing exclusively in theaters but will be available to rent or buy from video-on-demand services in February.
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