Who are the Main Players?
CONTAINS SPOILERS, OBVIOUSLY… IT’S A REVIEW!!!
The Lion King is the latest addition to Disney’s money-spinning mission to recycle it’s animated back catalogue with ‘live-action’ remakes. This year alone we’ve seen ‘Dumbo’ given the Tim Burton treatment (enough said), and ‘Aladdin’ from Guy Ritchie, from which the most interesting thing was Will Smith replacing the late Robin Williams as the genie of the lamp. We have ‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘Mulan’ among others to come next 12 months. Yawn.
John Favreau somehow gets to sit in the director’s chair again after what I think of as a failed attempt at ‘The Jungle Book’ a couple of years ago. The screenplay is overseen by Jeff Nathanson whose frankly mixed bag of credits include the universally ridiculed ‘Speed 2: Cruise Control’ and the pretty decent ‘Rush Hour 2’. Additionally, the evergreen Hans Zimmer pulls the strings musically but remains more or less faithful to the original score.
What’s the Lowdown?
I don’t feel I’ve started off too subtly here, as and you can tell, I absolutely detest Disney’s ‘live-action’ remakes, and we’ll get into the details more a bit later.
Have a look at the trailer below – there are a couple of really telling things that are happening. As I will get into later, animals don’t speak. And I believe that the more photo-realistic you create a CGI animal (a lion, for example), the more ridiculous they look when they talk. That’s the charm that animated Simba had, that CGI Simba cannot possibly recreate. In this trailer, you only see one example of speech – Scar. There is a lot of dialogue in this movie, so the fact that they chose not to show this in the trailer is very deliberate and is a sign that they don’t want people to remember that part. They spend a lot of time showing off the all-star cast though.
This all screams, “look how stunningly beautiful and atmospheric this movie is and how many stars we got into the voice recording booth, but don’t worry too much about whether it’s a well-told story or not”.
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I haven’t pulled any punches so far, but don’t worry this isn’t completely designed to just slag the movie off! Please do let me know what you think so far of this and our other reviews. Also be sure to check out my company’s blog over at www.biggundigital.co.uk/blog where I discuss the latest happenings in the world of Digital Marketing, Social Media and beyond.
Right, let’s back to Disney, and The Lion King…
The Lion King: A Wonderful Story of Destiny and Potential
‘The Lion King’ is a story of love, and fulfilling your destiny. It follows Simba (as voiced by the talented Donald Glover), a lion cub born to Mufasa (James Earl Jones brilliantly reprises this role from the 1994 original) and Sarabi (Alfre Woodard). Simba is heir to the throne in the pride lands. Mufasa is loved by all and Simba enjoys a silver spoon upbringing, prancing around the pride lands with his friend with benefits, Nala (Beyonce Knowles-Carter) and advisor-in-chief, Zazu (Jon Oliver).
All is sunshine and rainbows in the pride lands until we are introduced to Scar. Chiwetel Ejiofor puts in an average-to-OK performance as Mufasa’s scrawny brother who is bitter about not being the king himself. With his band of gangsta (sic) Hyenas, he plots to kill Mufasa and Simba to claim the throne for himself. However, his assassination attempt only manages to kill Mufasa and he takes the next best step: convince Simba it was all his fault and that he must run away. Which he does.
Simba runs into Timon and Pumbaa, voiced by Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen respectively, who sum up the comic whimsy of the roles to decent effect and teach him not to sweat the small stuff. ‘Hakuna Matata’ (translation from Swahili: ‘No Worries” if you will. Hakuna Matata is essentially ‘The Bare Necessities’ on steroids and serves the same purpose.
Simba’s gap year break is then interrupted by Nala who tracks him down to tell him how bad the pride lands have become without him, that he has been duped by Scar, and no one actually blames him for his father’s death. So what else could Simba do? He returns to the pride lands, has a showdown with Scar and takes his place, not only as the one true king but also in the great circle of life. He, therefore, fulfils his destiny.
The Lion King and Live-Action
The story is a beautiful one and it was told beautifully in 1994. I am not denying this.
Let me start by reiterating that the CGI savannah is absolutely phenomenal and the team that built the virtual world thoroughly deserve the Oscar that will no doubt be winging its way to Disney studios next year. I read that, much like a video game like Grand Theft Auto, the animators created the sprawling world in order to move the characters around realistically. This is mould-breaking and you sometimes forget it is a Disney movie rather than an Attenborough documentary. You can almost pick out each insect.
Going back nearly a decade, I remember looking as Aslan in the Narnia movies and thinking that it didn’t look like a real lion. I remember joking at the time that the old-time Action Man adverts used to speak of “realistic hair” yet Alsan looked awful! No such concerns here – they are completely photorealistic and that the technical masterclass is absolutely breath-taking.
And, for me at least, therein lies the problem. The Disney characters in 1994 were personable and emotive. Simba looked like a cheeky chappy with his beaming smile and wide eyes, but these are not emotions a real lion would portray. This makes all the characters completely devoid of emotion.
The Burden of Comparison
The problem here is one of comparison. In my opinion, all of these “live-action” remakes fail in comparison to the originals. I am a huge fan of the 1967 animated Jungle Book, and what I’ve just said could just as easily be applied there. I loved Shere Khan. I love Idris Elba. But what happened there was an absolute mess.
Shere Khan was one of the all-time great cartoon villains. He was arrogant, he was cocky and you could see the fear of fire through the way Disney animated him. George Sanders, the original voice, was also perfect for the role. I didn’t feel the same in the remake. The on-screen lion and the voice didn’t quite seem connected. It looked dubbed on, and the same could be said for The Lion King.
Emotion is hard to portray, and this problem is magnified many times when portraying emotion on the face of animals that are not supposed to portray emotion anyway. Check out this shot-for-shot comparison from Youtuber, Sowick:
I get that the new one visually looks better. But look at when the new-born Simba is looking up with wide-eyed wonderment at Rafiki.
Does “Live Action” mean “Better?”
I would perhaps see a movie about a photo-realistically animated pride of lions fighting to fulfil their destiny – this format has worked in the past with dogs, penguins and other animals – so why not? But the minute a Disney logo and The Lion King name applied, it became an inferior product and a decision was made. “Let’s not bother being creative any more; let’s just make a fat pile of cash”.
Are the stories improved by these remakes? Does the Emma Watson portrayal of a real-life Belle in the 2017 remake of ‘The Beauty and the Beast’ add anything that wasn’t available in the 1991 animation? It seems to me that the stories that are mainly human-character led such as Beauty and the Beast or Alladin are prime candidates for this. But the animal-related tales are just completely out of place.
Where will it end? Will we expect to see a live-action Mickey Mouse? I can’t even imagine a real mouse driving a steamboat. Will there be a photo-realistic ‘Finding Nemo’ or are they close enough already?
Disney is a company that is built on innovation and creativity, and I feel this is now gone. It’s a company built on making money. In 1995 when Toy Story was in production, the plug was nearly pulled several times because they felt like the story wasn’t strong enough. They knew they were going into unchartered territory and it rightly scared them. Ed Catmull and his team knew what was on the line and they worked tirelessly to make sure they didn’t screw it up. Such principles no longer run through this company.
Opinion and Banana Rating
As I said earlier, the CGI is breathtaking, and the cast list is so full of stars that you can’t help but be impressed, but it seems to me like this is the reason they did it. As a shot-for-0shot remake of an old story with updated graphics and a stellar cast list, it’s an exercise in Marketing, rather than film making.
Looking past all that, it’s a good movie. The story is one that is tried and tested over 25 years since the original and a massively successful Broadway musical but I don’t know why they bothered. However, you can’t see anything about this movie without comparing it the original – how could you? Disney has done that on purpose. And on those grounds, and I hated it for that reason.
I can’t see anything more than 5 Bananas for The Lion King.
What do you think of The Lion King? Were you a fan of the movie? Are you worried about where Disney is going with this? Let us know in the comments.
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