The Lion King (2019) Review
The Lion King is a pretty weird concept when you think about it. Whenever the movie comes into conversation, I always wonder how the original pitch went down for what’s essentially Shakespeare’s Hamlet but with lions who like to sing songs by Elton John. Regardless of how that meeting went, I can guarantee you no one in their right mind thought yes, we want these lions to look and move just as a real lion would. Maybe that’s because the technology we have now didn’t exist back then, and thank god it didn’t because if the 2019 remake was released in place of the 1994 original, I have a feeling we wouldn’t look back on The Lion King as arguably the crowning achievement of Disney’s Renaissance era.
2019’s The Lion King is a scene for scene retread, and yet it somehow manages to fall considerably short of its source material. While it embraces a remarkable level of visual realism, it comes at the expense of the movie’s overall quality. The whole experience feels more akin to a CGI tech demo than a proper film. Every moment wants to overtly flex the realism of what you’re seeing, but to what end? The character’s wind up embarrassingly expressionless because there’s only so much you can communicate with a photorealistic lion. Watching a meerkat, a pig, and a lion sing Hakuna Matata with the coldest resting bitch face you’ve ever seen is really odd and ironically made it harder for me to suspend my disbelief in comparison to The Lion King’s cartoon counterpart.
The movie’s photorealistic style even negatively impacts certain aspects of the movie that you can’t see. From the moment the animals began speaking, I couldn’t help but feel their voices sounded strangely flat and monotone, but when I closed my eyes and listened, my opinion on the film’s vocal performances changed for the better. The expressionlessness of the characters was so overwhelming that it literally muted any emotion that tried to shine through in their words. This is most readily apparent during The Lion King’s iconic songs which are now riddled with random vocal acrobatics in a failed attempt to add feeling and counter the uncanny valley effect plaguing the film.
At its inception, animation exists to help bring to life the ideas that can’t live within our own reality. The fact of the matter, though, is that nowadays animation is so advanced that those ideas can live in our own reality, and it’s only a matter of tastefully deciding how and if we should use it. 2016’s The Jungle Book did a wonderful job at conveying what that once animated story might look like in the real world, but it took bold artistic liberties and created a visual language of its own to successfully make the leap from cartoon to “live-action”. The Lion King on the other hand, with its stubborn insistence on photorealism, feels lost in translation.
Verdict: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should” - Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park (1993)