If you answered yes to just one of these questions, then The Lion King (2019) is the film for you.
If you answered no and are a reasonably minded human being, then this film might actually be the most insulting Disney Remake to this date for you. The film attempts nothing out of the box or unique. If anything, so much of the film is just a sad attempt at even a watered down version of he original motion picture. It was made with no heart, no charm and lacks basically all of the nuance and scope of the original film from 1994. In an attempt to make the film as realistic naturally as possible, Jon Favreau and Disney made several key mistakes in attempting to replicate the success of why The Lion King appealed to us so much when we were younger and still does to this day. And they are all extremely easy to spot. But, let's go through this film bit by bit.
Plot: (I'd ordinarily slap the OG 1994 plotlines here, but I'm going to be nice). In the African Savannah, a young lion cub is born to proud parents in the wise King Mufasa (James Earl Jones) and his wife Queen Sarabi (Alfre Woodard) in the hopes of him succeeding Mufasa as King when he's older. Simba (JD McCrary as a Cub and Donald Glover as an Adult), does his best to learn from his wise and powerful father, but simply cannot shake the joys and ideas of how he might one day become King of all of the Pride Lands and be able to do things the way he wants them to be done, much to the dismay of the King's Majordomo, a hornbill named Zazu (John Oliver).
However, Mufasa's brother Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is deeply jealous of his nephew and plots to have the cub murdered by a pack of vicious yet scatterbrained Hyenas. The plot to have Simba and his friend Nala (Shahadi Wright Joseph as a Cub and Beyonce Knowles-Carter as an Adult) eaten by the hyenas is foiled by Mufasa, prompting Scar to fully align himself with the Hyenas in an attempt to overthrow Mufasa and take his self-proclaimed rightful place as King. This leads to Simba being cornered in the gorge by a stampede of frightened wildebeests. Mufasa plunges into the gorge to save his son and succeeds, but when he tried to climb his way out, Scar threw his brother back into the gorge, killing him. Simba comes across his father's body and is informed by Scar that it was his fault for his father's death, urging the cub to run away from his guilt rather than face up to his mother and the pride for killing Mufasa. Simba flees and even manages to avoid the Hyenas once more before entering exile. With Mufasa and Simba both presumed dead, Scar assumes the throne of Pride Rock and announces the Hyenas would be joining him.
Simba is found unconscious in the desert by a Warthog named Pumbaa (Seth Rogen) and his meerkat companion in Timon (Billy Eichner). Despite being afraid of the cub initially, Timon and Pumbaa become surrogate siblings to the cub and teach him about their lifestyle known as Hakuna Matata. Simba comes to find himself at home in the jungles of Timon and Pumbaa and grows into a lackadaisical and carefree grown up lion, but he still has moments of self-reflection and doubt regarding his failure to uphold his father's teachings. One day, Simba saves Timon and Pumbaa from a hungry lioness and discovers that it is in fact his childhood friend Nala. Though the two become enamored with one another, Nala informs Simba of the monstrous conditions the Pridelands have endured under Scar's reign and pleads with him to return home. Simba doubts himself and thus declines, leaving it up to the wise shaman mandrill known as Rafiki (John Kani) to show Simba that his father's spirit lives on inside of him and that he must accept his responsibilities.
What's Wrong?: I'd like to say that this film doesn't have a "Where do I even begin" type of amount of flaws, but once again, Disney doesn't want to have to put legitimate effort into these remakes, so I once again have to trot out the old line of "Where do I even begin with this film?" Don't like it? Tough. This film stinks to high heaven.
As with Aladdin (2019), the cast for this film is all over the map. While some actors manage to provide us with quality voice acting (chiefly Donald Glover), most of the actors in this film don't even seem to be trying for the most part. This is especially prevalent in James Earl Jones's reprising of Mufasa and Beyonce's role as Nala. The problem with casting Mufasa as James Earl Jones again is that the presence of his voice in this role is just not fitting. Color me crazy, but when I first learned they were bringing James Earl Jones back, I thought they would rewrite Mufasa to be an older lion who finally managed to have a son, thus causing his rift between him and Scar. I guess a man who sounded too silly to be Darth Vader anymore in Rogue One was just perfect to play the King of the Pridelands in the prime of his life. James Earl Jones's voice simply does not fit the role of a powerful lion anymore. It's nothing he did, it's just the fact that he's 25 years older now. It'd be like bringing Billy Joel back to play Dodger in a remake of Oliver and Company. (This is NOT an endorsement Disney, please do not remake Oliver and Company!) So much so, that there are actually some instances where James Earl Jones's lines from the original film (used and unused) are repurposed for this film. It's most prevalent in the Stampede when Mufasa calls out to his son. It's literally lines he had from the 1994 film. And the fact that it's packaged around some of 25 years later JEJ's lines shows way too much for this film to be taken seriously.
Beyonce is even worse, and unlike JEJ, she has no excuse. While I wish we could live in a world where after she was flatly refused the role of Tiana in The Princess and the Frog due to her arrogance about auditioning that she never got an opportunity to ruin a Disney Film, Disney seems to hate me these days so we gave her a role yours truly already wasn't the most fond of. And, as one would expect, Beyonce siphons all of the joy out of the room with her weak performance as Nala. She seems like she's literally reading from a script every time Nala is on screen and it's not even subtle. She was basically there just to sing the lousy song they added in for her to sing (we'll get to that in a moment).
Scar is also such an uneven villain in this performance that it's kind of sad. Chiwetel Ejiofor is fairly decent in the role, but he seems to be trying to hard to evoke both Idris Elba's Shere Khan from The Jungle Book (2016) and Jeremy Irons's role from the original movie. And both those roles are just incompatible. Scar cannot be both a vicious brute and a sly and devious lion, but the movie tries to have Scar act both ways. They also gave him the slimmest of backstories about his rivalry with Mufasa, but because it's only hinted at, we cannot really get behind either sympathizing or truly despising this iteration of Scar. Let me put it to you this way, when I saw this film opening day in July of 2019, no one said a word when Scar met his end. When I saw the original for it's re-release in 2011, people burst into applause to see Scar meet his end in that one. When you're not even cheering for the villains defeat, you know you failed as a Disney storyteller.
You know when I decided this film was bad? The very first frame we see of it. The 1994 Film explodes onto the scene with the pitch black screen and then the sun rises over the horizon in tune with the African Chants of Lebo M. It made the Sun (AKA the Circle of Life) at the forefront of the picture and placed it in the center of the frame to emphasize it's importance. The 2019 Film has a still few seconds of a lit up African Landscape until the sun creeps out from over the trees (Not the horizon, the trees) and Lebo's original chants from the first movie slapped onto the screen. The sun isn't even in the center of the screen! It's like Disney made the film without even thinking of what was most important about why it appealed to so many people.
Speaking of which, the reason The Jungle Book's hyper-realistic animation worked is because you had actors who were emoting despite the animal characters not being able to show much of it. The actors were so in tune with their characters that you almost didn't notice that Kaa or Bagheera couldn't emote much as animals. What also helps is that The Jungle Book, while tonally flawed and confused, still knows what it wants to be in each and every scene, allowing for the film to move at a pace the actors/characters can shine in. Where The Lion King fails while The Jungle Book succeeded was in the fact that for the most part (apart from Shere Khan killing Akela and one or two other scenes), The Jungle Book isn't a particularly emotionally evocative film. And it doesn't try to be. The Lion King's entire appeal is through it's emotional connection with both it's characters and the audience. When you see that the hyper-realistic animation fails to capture the human emotions that are rampant throughout the original 1994 film in numerous scenes, it becomes a jarring and hollow experience to say the least. Because the acting is so subpar and the animation is too realistic for it to be believable, Hans Zimmer has to basically carry this film on his back most of the time. There are many instances where the lack of emotion on the faces of the characters hurts the film the most, but the primary scenes are the ones you would expect in where Simba comes across Mufasa's body and especially when Simba sees his father's ghost at the end of the film. The actors (at least Donald Glover) is doing the best he can and the lines given are actually fairly powerful, but the animation of the scene is too realistic for us to be come emotionally invested. And in a movie where the heart of it is the emotional connections it makes with the audiences, this is a terrible thing to endure.
The music is also some of the most jarring I have ever heard in one of these animated musicals to this date. "Circle of Life" is still the strongest song in the film, with the new vocals allowing me to not feel so suffocated by nostalgia despite reusing Lebo and the rest of his African Choir's chants from the original. "I Just Can't Wait To Be King" was orchestrated okay, but the scene itself is almost unwatchable. There is no cartoony styles or even a dream sequence where Disney's animators could have gone ham and made basically whatever they wanted. It was literally Simba and Nala running around the watering hole until they lost Zazu. "Hakuna Matata" isn't bad, it's just the fact that it again doesn't fit in this kind of story they are telling. The song works for the original and the Broadway adaptations because they aren't supposed to be realistic takes on the story. Here, they try to be cartoonish with the storyline, but it doesn't fit because we aren't allowed to see these characters emote thanks to the animation. "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" is bad, but mostly because of my personal disdain for Beyonce and how I think she just butchered this song. They honestly should have just done the full Elton John version and it probably would have worked better for the film emotionally. The crown jewels of awful come from the likes of "Be Prepared" and the newest song "Spirit". "Be Prepared" can't even really classify as a song. It's just Chiwetel Ejiofor speak-singing his way through a muted and less theatrical version of the 1994 song. All that made the original song so iconic is gone. The beat, the pacing and the lyrics have all been shifted and moved about to make Scar's song more of a speech about the lion's fascist ideology instead of his theatrical plot to murder his brother and nephew. But for all the faults of "Be Prepared", I have to give it "Spirit" as being one of the worst songs I have ever heard. Ignoring the fact that Beyonce is the one singing it for a moment, let's take a look at where this song comes into the story. Jon Favreau and the writing staff made the "odd" choice of excluding the most important scene in the film where Rafiki demonstrates the lesson of the film to Simba ("The Past Can Hurt" scene). They skipped by Simba's doubts and fears so quickly, I genuinely thought they were going to rush into his fight with Scar, but of course they didn't. Instead, we got to listen to a terrible Beyonce song while Simba ran the entire length from the Jungle back to Pride Rock. And I mean the ENTIRE length. The desert, the gorge and all the way back to them coming up to Pride Rock. The 1994 Film made this scene so iconic not through a lazy and rushed together song, but through Hans Zimmer's score and animation techniques that Disney had never attempted before. It's without a doubt one of the most powerful moments of the film from Simba running through the desert to his arrival just outside of Pride Rock ON HIS OWN instead of running back with Nala. It makes Nala's role seem more important than it actually was. Maybe if literally anyone else but Beyonce was singing here, it might have been good.
The film is full from top to bottom with filler and fluff that makes the film longer than it should have been. Three scenes stand out the most to me in this regard. After the bombastic opening in "Circle of Life" we follow a mouse running around the Pride Lands for what seemed like a firm 90 seconds until it comes across the cave Scar was lurking in. Did we really need to see this? It's one of the flaws I have for Bambi, but at least that film has the excuse of being more about the whole story of the forest during Bambi's youth and not centralized around a small cast of characters. The mouse in the original film is on screen for like 5 seconds before Scar's paw comes down to catch it. The second scene is during the Stampede. Time is of the essence to save Simba before he is trampled by Wildebeests, but we are shown the entirety of Mufasa's descent into the gorge, which takes a solid 20 or so seconds, whereas in the original film it takes maybe 5 seconds tops. I know they were trying to make it more realistic and you can't have Mufasa literally diving into the gorge, but if you want to make a realistic film out of something that needs to be as grand and spectacular as The Lion King, you've already lost. The third and without a doubt most frustrating scene is HANDS DOWN when Rafiki learns Simba is still alive. Unlike in the 1994 film, where Simba sighs into a pile of leaves that carries down towards Rafiki's tree, in this film Simba loses a tuft of his mane that is (please note, I am NOT joking here when I type these words!) eaten by a giraffe, shit out, and brought up to Rafiki's tree by a dung beetle. And without any of the mysticism of the original, he basically just blurts out Simba's name. It's like Favreau did this film just for a paycheck (which stinks because of how much I enjoy Elf and the original Iron Man)
What's Good?: I've bashed this film enough for one blog post. So, what do I like about this film? Well, once again, Hans Zimmer is the unsung MVP of The Lion King. His rich orchestral scores, even when evoking the original film, are simply too powerful for me to even find a solid critique of. I mean, I probably could, but Hans Zimmer is the last person who deserves it as far as I'm concerned. The man is a wizard with music and I give him credit where it's due. If this film had a watered down film score, it might be the worst of these films by far, but I'm sticking to my guns and saying Aladdin is worse.
Donald Glover is also a fairly good Simba. I at first wasn't a fan, but the more I thought about it, Matthew Broderick wasn't exactly a superstar in the acting department as Simba in the first film, so I lowered by expectations for a second viewing. And I'm pleased to say I was impressed with him. He wasn't Oscar worthy, but he did handle the emotional scenes of the film better than I think both JD McCrary and Matthew Broderick did in their respective roles. A fair balance of Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Donald Glover would probably have been for the best. Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner are also fairly decent as Pumbaa and Timon respectively. They don't try too hard to evoke Ernie Sabella and Nathan Lane and take the roles over for themselves. Seth Rogen's Pumbaa is probably my favorite role for a comedian I otherwise think is just "meh" overall.
Maybe it was because both Kingdom Hearts III and Aladdin (2019) beat me down so badly earlier in the year, but I left the film feeling nothing when I saw it. Not anger, not joy, not depression. Just...nothing. It didn't hurt me that much and it didn't offend me too much. It was just a poor adaptation. And comparing that to how I felt about Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast, I think that is more or less a step in the right direction.
Overall: If not for Cinderella (2015), this would probably be the best film of all of these. It's terrible, it's lazy and above all it leaves you feeling emotionally stale unless you have the attention span of a gnat or just really love Beyonce, but unlike the few films that proceeded it, it actually does try in some parts of it. Some parts it does better than the original, but it's biggest flaw is that the original exists already and has touched far more people than this cheap imitation ever could or would. If you had to choose between the original film and the cheap imitation that technically wasn't that cheap (the film cost a ton of money to make), why would you ever pick this one over the original?
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