Disney’s reanimated Lion King is hakuna meh-tata

There’s probably a very good reason William Shakespeare didn’t turn to the flora and fauna of Africa when originally staging Hamlet and my money is on the inability of big cats to emote properly because that’s one of the biggest problems with this ‘live-action’ Lion King has. Oh, it’s still a great story, competently told but it’s never more than a pale, exquisitely rendered, CGI shadow of its former self.

Jon Favreau’s The Lion King is a giant leap forward for animation, but a few steps backwards for storytelling as the photorealistic approach robs many of the characters of their expressiveness and ability to emote properly. In fact, so closely does this new version hew to the original story that it’s a puzzle they bothered to get a new cast at all and didn’t just reuse the original dialogue track for the new visuals. It doesn’t help that the voice cast and performances across the board just aren’t quite as good as the original (okay, Donald Glover > Matthew Broderick) even, bizarrely, including James Earl Jones’ Mufasa, which is a noticeably flatter and less vibrant performance than his 1994 reading.

One thing the live-action Disney reimaginings have struggled with thus far is the animated showstoppers, with only Aladdin proving the exception to the rule with ‘Prince Ali’. Beauty And The Beast’s ‘Be Our Guest’ was a muddy CGI nightmare and here ‘I Just Can’t Wait To Be King’ is so underwhelmingly staged and performed it makes me fear for what may become of ‘Under The Sea’ in the forthcoming The Little Mermaid remake.

This is the first one of Disney’s live-action adaptation I can’t think of a single reason why you’d ever choose to watch this version over the animated original. Not a single one. It’s only redeeming feature is that the technical achievement is so astonishing we need no longer worry that future generations will be robbed of their chance to see what all the extinct animals used to look like in the wild now we can recreate them with unerringly de-anthropomorphised accuracy.

the lion king review
Score 5/10
logo

Related posts

In Your Eyes (2014) Review

In Your Eyes (2014) Review

I listen to the voices in my head and check out the romantic fantasy In Your Eyes The second production to come from Joss Whedon’s Bellwether Pictures (following last year’s “Much Ado About Nothing”), “In Your Eyes” is a modest, sweet, gently paced romance which may ultimately be...

Deep Blood (1990) Review

Deep Blood (1990) Review

Deep Blood will give you cinematic thrombosis Reaching deep into the chum bucket of bad shark movies for Shark Weak 4, I’ve managed to dredge up the cinematic equivalent of a decomposing fish head in the form of 1990’s spectacularly awful Italian sharksploitation flick DEEP...

Uncharted (2022) Review

Uncharted (2022) Review

Uncharted is okay for a speed run but you're unlikely to play it again and again In the interests of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I haven’t played any of the UNCHARTED games. Not one. In fact, the only reason I was able to recognise some of the nods to the source material was...

King Ralph (1991) Review

King Ralph (1991) Review

Mass Regicide makes for a surprisingly amiable comedy. A film that I have fond if faded memories of seeing a couple of times at my local 2 Screen (yes, two whole screens!) ABC cinema when it was released, King Ralph starts with the kind of absurdity that almost belongs in a Monty Python...

The Quiet Ones (2014) Review

The Quiet Ones (2014) Review

It's always The Quiet Ones. er…except in this case. Hammer Horror's resurrected body (of work) stumbles a little with "The Quiet Ones", an elegantly creepy, Seventies-set chiller about an Oxford professor seeking to debunk the supernatural by curing a 'possessed' teenage...

Don’t Breathe (2016) Review

Don't Breathe (2016) Review

I hope you haven't been holding your breath for this. An often tense and claustrophobically clever thriller, a little more humility would have done “Don’t Breathe” the world of good. When a gang of three opportunistic burglars get a tip-off about an easy mark, it seems like their ship...

White House Down (2013) Review

White House Down (2013) Review

White House Dumb. I went to see “White House Down” against my better judgement. I owe my better judgement an apology. It’s impossible to reflect on “White House Down” without mentioning “Olympus Has Fallen”, the similarly (and by similarly, I mean almost identically) themed action...

Through The Valley Of Shadows

Through The Valley Of Shadows

Yea, though I sat Through The Valley Of Shadows, I will hear no more of time crystals: for thou art peak Discovery; thy plot and thy writing staff they discomfit me. *SPOILERS* Kicking off what seems to be a loose three-part season finale, "we"Through The Valley Of Shadows" starts...