It Took 25 Years But Is 'The Lion King' Remake Worth The Wait?

THE LION KING

★1/2 

Was there anyone, ever, who watched 1994’s The Lion King — perhaps the definitive film of the Disney animation revival — and thought: “when that warthog and meerkat are singing a song filled with fart jokes, I wish they were more realistic?'"

Of course not. But when there’s money to be squeezed from the market, a corporate behemoth cares not for such concerns. Or, even, for simple common sense. And, thus, amidst a spate of ‘live action’ remakes that’ve spanned from Alice In Wonderland through Cinderella, Aladdin, and, now, the forthcoming Mulan, of course Disney is going to want milk an old cash cow — a movie that birthed the biggest Broadway show in history — for more coin. So, here’s the Lion King remake that no one asked for: bigger, blander, and so badly-conceived you can only shake your head.

The disbelief begins with the very premise. In the absence of any human characters, there’s no way to make even a partly ‘live action’ take on The Lion King. So, instead, we find old fashioned animation sadly shelved, and end up on the receiving end of a ‘photo realist’ CGI redo that feels like yet another cautionary tale on the horrors of Hollywood studios cannibalising their own IP.

As a firm believer, in general, that traditional hand drawn animation is infinitely superior — as form it’s expressive by nature, and open to wide ranging approaches in style — I’m never going to be on board with a digital rendering, in which individualism is swapped out for bland pixellation. But, simple logic dictates that any film featuring talking (and singing!) animals is a work of anthropomorphisation. By turning these animals into photo realist depictions, that anthropomorphisation is erased. The expressiveness of both line drawings and human-like facial movements is gone, leaving behind something that looks like nature documentary footage where the mouths are made to move. The characters don’t come to life. Instead, they feel utterly soulless, which is a pretty powerful symbol for the movie as a whole.

The overall effect means that this Lion King feels like it takes place not upon some storybook savannah, but deep in the uncanny valley. For all the wonder summoned by its CGI-assembled photographic vistas, buzzing insects, and the ruffling of a mane blowing in the breeze, every time one of its digital (re)creation characters opens their mouths, the atmospheric effect is blown. There’s no way to settle into the suspension of disbelief — into a whole new cinematic world — when the mismatched effect between voice and vision is so jarring.

I wondered, in the opening act, if there would come a point in which this effect would stop being so unnerving, but it never came. Meaning, for all the widescreen/iMAX-ready spectacle assembled by its endless army of technicians, this Lion King is inert as a drama; stiff and lifeless. The arrival of that fart-joke-singing warthog and meerkat (voiced by Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner, respectively) is a momentary breath of fresh air; in a film this dead, just the sound of Rogen’s guffaw feels like a balm for bruised viewers.

The brief injection of comic relief is especially a welcome respite in a movie whose central dramatic storyline never ‘takes’. It’s not just that this flick is running back a stock story about hereditary rule and patriarchal lineage — kings by birthright, boys hoping to be like their dads — but that it’s doing so with such flat, emotionless effect (and such bland voice performances by a so so Donald Glover and a pretty bad Beyoncé). Jokes, evidently, can transcend the trappings of creepy digi-animal deepfakes, but drama, and emotion, cannot.

It’s notable that the contemporary comic banter, newly inserted here, is meta: there’s references to the original Lion King, to Frozen, to Beauty & The Beast. In such, these comic asides speak of the raison d’être of the whole enterprise, which is clearly a work of entrenched Disney branding. This isn’t a film that needed to be made, a story begging to be (re-)told, something to spark the imagination of viewers.

Instead, this Lion King is the two hour entertainment product result of an avaricious corporate edict. No one asked for a veritable facsimile of the original in which the animals are rendered as more ‘life like’. And no one deserves a film so lifeless; a grand technological exercise that carries not a single instant of genuine joy.