The trend of Disney re-makes of their classic animated films has become a, shall we say, contentious thing within the fandom. While some animation fans are happy to see these classics re-imagined in a live action, plenty more are not so happy. The argument is that Disney is not adding anything new to these movies, and that their creation is purely for a cynical cash grab. While there is merit to those arguments, I for one try to judge each of these remakes on their own. The best remakes are the ones that can justify their existence, and make the case that a live action version of a classic animated film is there to compliment it rather than overshadow it. Disney, for the most part has been all over the place with their re-makes. Of the movies, I would say one is an improvement over the original (Pete’s Dragon), while quite a few are just as good (Cinderella, Jungle Book) and some that are not better but were decent in their own way (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin). But, then we have the re-makes that absolutely fail at being anywhere near the same league as the originals (Alice in Wonderland, Beauty and the Beast, Pinocchio, Dumbo). But this trend of Disney “live action” remakes hit it’s pinnacle with the release of 2019’s The Lion King. Pinnacle in terms of box office yes, with a world wide gross of $1.5 billion, but also pinnacle in it’s absolute worthlessness. I ranked the film as the worst of the year, and that was because I thought it represented the worst of the remake trend under Disney; a pure copy and paste job that paled against the original in every way and was the most blatant cash grab that I had ever witnessed from Disney, which is saying a lot. So, you can imagine that I had a lot of worries and resentment on my mind when I learned that Disney was preparing another film in the same world of their Lion King remake; a prequel centered around the character of Mufasa.
I get why Disney was doing this. Shareholders were pleased with the box office results of the first Lion King remake, and they wanted Disney to do it again. It didn’t matter that the first remake was critically panned (including from yours truly) and that it didn’t even register in awards season. The billion dollar gross was what mattered, so Disney was looking to find a way to follow up their mega-hit. But, what direction would they take. There were direct-to-video sequels to the original 1994 Lion King, but those films aren’t as beloved, so doing yet another copy and paste job wasn’t seen as ideal. They would have to go a more original route. Unfortunately for Disney, the director behind the first Lion King remake, Jon Favreau, had already moved over to the Lucasfilm side of the company to work on The Mandalorian series on Disney+, along with a slew of many other Star Wars projects in the pipeline. This was going to leave him unavailable for some time, so a new director was needed. Surprisingly, Disney went far outside their stable to look for a new director, and they found the unlikeliest of filmmakers to fill that role. Barry Jenkins was considered to be an art house filmmaker, having made a name for himself writing and directing Oscar winning films like Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). Going into the new decade he was deep into production of his ambitious mini-series for Amazon Prime, The Underground Railroad, when Disney approached him with the prospect of working on their follow-up to The Lion King, and he was surprisingly receptive to the offer. After gaining a strong reputation as a prestige director, was he gambling that good will by taking on what many saw as a corporate cash grab, or was he seizing an opportunity to bring his artistic style to a bigger canvas that would have broad appeal with worldwide audiences? It would all depend on if he could elevate this story beyond it’s predecessor and create something that both creatively satisfied himself as well as fulfilled the obligation that Disney had entrusted him with. And so, the result is the prequel backstory of Mufasa: The Lion King.
When Simba (Donald Glover) and Nala (Beyonce) must leave Pride Rock for a day, they entrust Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen) to babysit their daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter). A sudden storm causes the trio to seek refuge in a cave, where they also find Rafiki (John Kani) meditating. In order to help calm the rattled lioness cub and her companions until the storm passes, Rafiki begins to tell the story of how Kiara’s grandfather, Mufasa, became king. Young Mufasa (Braelyn Rankins) is washed away by a river and separated from his family. He ends up many miles away in the territory of another pride of lions. Their cub prince, Taka (Theo Somolu) helps save Mufasa from the perils of the river and brings him to the pride’s nesting grounds. Taka’s mother Eshe (Thandiwe Newton) takes Mufasa under herwing, but the father Obasi (Lennie James) doesn’t trust Mufasa because he is an outsider. Many years pass, and grown up Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) and Taka (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) have become as close as brothers. The peace of Obasi’s pridelands is shattered however when a pack of white lions invade. While protecting his adoptive mother, Mufasa kills one of the male white lions. The dead lion turns out to be the son of the white lions’ king, Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), who now has a vendetta against Obasi’s pride as well as for Mufasa himself. In order to secure the bloodline of the pride, Obasi sends his son and Mufasa away for their protection. Forced to seek out a home of their own, Taka and Mufasa venture into the wilderness. Mufasa convinces Taka that they should seek a vast green valley called Milele which he remembers his mother talking about when he was little. On the road, they encounter other travelers, including the lioness Sarabi (Tiffany Boone) and her bird companion Zazu (Preston Nyman), as well as a young Rafiki (Kagiso Lediga). But, their journey is not without more peril, and Kiros and his minions are following their tracks every step of the way. Can they stay ahead, and does the presence of Sarabi drive a wedge between the Mufasa and Taka that shatters their brotherhood?
Given my distaste for the first Lion King remake, I didn’t have a lot of high hopes for this prequel. My interest did perk up though when I learned that Barry Jenkins was tapped to direct. Jenkin’s involvement could indeed bring some much needed depth and character to what otherwise was a soulless corporate product. But, was Disney going to let him cook, or was he going to be another promising filmmaker swallowed up by the machine. The expectations were already low, and my hope was that the movie wouldn’t be any worse than the first film. And thankfully, it isn’t. At the same time it’s also not a whole lot better either. Mufasa: The Lion King is an improvement in many ways, but it also suffers from a lot of problems that are just inherent in the presentation itself. Let me start with the positive, in that it is refreshing that this movie is not just another copy and paste job like the last movie. The Lion King remake was one of the laziest big studio films that I had ever experienced, because it was a purely shot for shot remake, minus all of the soul that you get out of traditional animation. I’ll talk more about my issues with the animation later, but at least story-wise it was refreshing watching this movie and not knowing what the story beats would be from scene to scene. Now, the story was a still a tad bit on the predictable side, but at least they were building from scratch and not with the same exact script from another movie. It’s a risk taking on a prequel, because you ultimately know the destination it’s heading towards. But, the backstory of Mufasa is something that Disney has never really explored much in any media, so if there was any fertile ground to mine out of this franchise, this is where they found it, and Mufasa is a compelling enough character that the movie does manage to justify it’s own existence, merely by finally giving us something we haven’t seen yet out of this world.
Where the film falters though is in it’s inconsistent execution of the story. The biggest flaw of the film is it’s framing device. The film pulls away from Mufasa’s story constantly to remind the audience that they are being told the story second-hand by Rafiki. I have a feeling that this was a studio mandated addition to the film that Barry Jenkins was forced to put in there, just to break up the seriousness of the movie’s tone in order to inject more kid friendly comedy to stay with the shot attention spans of younger audiences. Each time these cutaways would happen in the film, it would grind the movie to a halt, and rob the movie of any dramatic heft. And the cutaways to the present would be excruciating too, because it involved very unfunny comedy relief from Timon and Pumbaa. Seriously, I hated this framing device so much because of what it was doing to the story proper. Even worse, they were making meta jokes about The Lion King movie, the Broadway play, and Disney in general that felt horribly out of place in this world and just seemed like a desperate ploy by Disney creatives to make themselves look more clever than they really are. They should have just let Barry Jenkins work with the story he was given and not feel the need to spice it up with pop culture puns. You could cut out all of these cringey interstitials and the story would’ve flowed so much better. It may not have been the greatest story ever told, but the tone wouldn’t feel all over the place and you would get a more cohesive experience. It’s where the film felt like it was compromised the most. While watching it, I found myself managing to appreciate the story when it found it’s groove, but then I’d grow frustrated again every time Timon and Pumbaa butted in. It’s the worst instincts of studio interference sabotaging whatever kinds of improvements that this movie was attempting to make in response to the first movie’s mistakes.
Overall, Barry Jenkins does attempt to bring some improvements, but it also feels that he had his hands tied. But there were just some things that were also impossible to fix in general. The photorealism of the movie is still a major problem, because of how it robs the character out of the animation. I talked about this a lot in my original “live action” Lion King review here, but this film too suffers from the lack emotive animation that the traditional style can offer. When you use traditional, “cartoony” animation, you can give everything from humans to animals to even appliances expressive facial emotions. This goes a long way towards helping an audience connect with these characters on an emotional level, because the animators are able to display emotion purely through expression; conveying things that dialogue along can’t deliver. When animating with photorealistic animal characters, you lose that creative license because animals like lions don’t have a wide array of facial expressions in real life. A lion’s face is emotionless by nature, and trying to get that kind of character model to emote in a movie like this while still maintaining that photorealism just doesn’t work. The animators try to push expressions just a little bit more here compared to the first film, but the movie still can’t quite get there. It doesn’t help that Jenkins is also a novice when it comes to animation, so he isn’t able to push the medium beyond it’s comfort zone. There are some impressive shots of landscapes in this movie, and I do appreciate the diverse amount of locations that Jenkins tries to bring into this world, including a beautiful passage through snow capped mountains. But the photorealistic presentation also just keeps things feeling impersonal when it should be awe-inspiring. The thought that kept crossing my head throughout the movie was that all of this might have made for a better movie if it was a prequel to the original animated movie and animated in that style instead. It may not have been as good as that 30 year old classic, but it would have had a lot more character to it than what we got here.
The film is also a mixed bag in terms of the vocal performances. For one thing, I really was not digging the shoehorned way that the orginal film’s cast was brought into this movie. It just reminded me about the waste of talent that the first remake was. Donald Glover still sounds unremarkable as Simba, and I think Beyonce just gets one line total in this entire movie (and still manages to be one of the top billed stars). Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen were especially grating this time around and really wanted them to shut up every time the movie cut back to them. But at the same time, I thought the movie had some strong performances from the newcomers. The best performance by far comes from Aaron Pierre, who had the unenviable task of playing Mufasa. He had enormous shoes to fill, as he’s tasked with taking over the role from the late great James Earl Jones, an actor so iconicly tied to the role of Mufasa that he voiced him twice, both in the original and the remake. Pierre manages to pick up that mantle in a way that is respectful to Jones’ performance, but also allows for the actor to make it his own. I also viewed Kelvin Harrison Jr.’s performance as Taka to be a far better take on the character that one day becomes the villain Scar than Chiwetel Ejiofor’s phoned in performance in the original remake. Of course, both still pale compared to Jeremy Iron’s original performance. Speaking of villainous turns, Mads Mikkelsen reliably brings some appropriate menace to the character of Kiros, and helps the somewhat one-dimensional villain stand out just a bit better. One other thing that this movie has going for it is that it features a new score of original songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda; Disney’s current in-house hit maker. While the songs here are passable, they aren’t quite as strong as Miranda’s other recent work and certainly no where near the quality of Elton John’s work in the original animated classic. But, at least Barry Jenkins has a voice cast here that’s capable of singing and doing the Miranda songs justice. You don’t have to listen to Eichner and Rogen mangle “Hakuna Matata” anymore.
Whatever issues Disney still has with their production of live action remakes, none of them are going to be solved by the results of Mufasa: The Lion King. Certainly bringing Barry Jenkins on board to direct this movie was a bold move, but even a great filmmaker like him can only do so much to lampshade the problems that are inherent in the production to begin with. I can see the kernels of the more enriching story about destiny and finding yourself through adversity that Barry Jenkins was trying to strive for in his telling of Mufasa’s story, but I also see all of the meddling from Disney executives who seemed to get cold feet from this more mature storyline and tried to shoe horn in more stuff for the little kids. The most redeeming thing about this film is that it has more originality to it than a straightforward remake. Barry Jenkins doesn’t use any pre-built template here and tries his best to craft something new. In some fleeting moments, he succeeds, and the movie actually rises above it’s mediocrity. But too often, you feel the cynicism of the studio trying to milk this franchise out of all the money they can get from it. My hope is that Barry Jenkins is able to use this exercise to grow as a filmmaker and make something bold and ambitious for his next film. The worst case is if it ruins his reputation and he just becomes a director for hire in the future, no longer driving his own artistic style but rather just finding the work that he can get. He’s a very unique voice, and it’s a risk for someone like him to work within the machine like he’s doing here with Mufasa. I give him credit for trying, and you do see flashes of creative brilliance here. But Mufasa just has too many flaws that hold it back. It is an improvement over the first remake, but I argue again why they don’t just take this story and apply it to the original animated style. That’s where this story truly belongs, and I feel like The Lion King’s place is less in a real world aesthetic and more in the realm of escapist fantasy that hand drawn animation can provide. Stop trying to strip away the color and animation out of this storyline and let this Lion King truly roar.
Rating: 6/10