Film Review: The Lion King
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The Lion King, Disney’s latest attempt to bring beloved animated classic to a new era, is quite an interesting filmmaking experiment. One part nostalgia trip and one part new age technology, the combination of the two begins as a fascinatingly realized vision and slowly morphs into a nostalgia trip painted with a pixel rather than a brush.
If you somehow haven’t seen one of the highest grossing animated films of all time, let me refresh your memory. Simba is the son of Mufasa, King of the Pridelands, and he just can’t wait to be king. This eagerness and childlike disdain for the rules makes him the perfect pawn for his uncle Scar to orchestrate Mufasa’s death and Simba’s exile. He befriends a meerkat and a warthog named Timon and Pumba who help him find a problem free life philosophy. But Simba’s destiny comes calling and he has to make a choice to fight for his kingdom.
The Lion King is among my favorite animated films and the stage show version might be the most magical adaptation of anything ever. The reason that the Broadway musical is so beloved and thrilling is that in the hands of Julie Taymor it took on a new life and vision. This new version of The Lion King is a nearly shot for shot remake of the animated film, something that worked more in the first half than the later half. That sense of normalcy and nostalgia is a comforting blanket to be wrapped around, but I found myself longing to be free of it, because it so rarely hit the heights of the previous 2 interpretations of the tale. The songs felt more like singalong moments than integrated pieces, they ruined one of the greatest villain songs of all time with a talk singing performance from Chiwetel Ejiofer, and even the lovely song Beyonce made for it is so oddly placed it just made me laugh. Even the one true gut busting belly laugh I got from the many joke attempts is based on my knowledge of another Disney property recently turned into a live action film. So even when the movie tries to be different, it can’t get out of its own way or it flops.
It’s hard to truly ascertain why this version of the story didn’t do much for me. The technical aspects are undeniably good in terms of the sheer skill it takes to make. There’s beautiful images and the rendering of these creatures is astounding. They must have used some of the Pixar folks who worked on The Good Dinosaur cause this has the 2nd most photorealistic water I’ve ever seen. The problem is that once Simba is no longer a cub, the visual effects don’t contain quite the same power. It’s not that they aren’t beautiful to look at, but just that the weight and gravitas of them being awe inspiring was no longer there. Take Simba’s eventual showdown with Scar, which is not quite Brave level bad, but visually confusing all the same as Simba and Scar in motion look basically the same.
Also, I think it might be time to place a moratorium on casting famous people in these properties. Though Billy Eichner was the clear MVP of the cast and I will always love James Earl Jones, almost everyone else was either super distracting because of their distinctness (Beyonce, Seth Rogen) or couldn’t combine the voice and singing (Chiwetel). In the end the voice work is just a symptom of the movie as a whole, so many elements that when combine don’t into your pores the way The Lion King should.
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