The Lion King (2019)

I can describe this movie in one word: dull.
The colors weren’t vibrant or vivid, the sounds weren’t deep and rumbling, and the image quality wasn’t as flawless as it should have been.
And while not ‘dull,’ they didn’t sing “Be Prepared,” which was an affront to everything.

I’m not going to relay any plot points or character explanations to you here, because if you’re reading my reviews and you haven’t seen the original animated “Lion King” (1994), I need you to stop reading now and go watch it. This movie is almost a shot-for-shot remake.

For the last few decades, NatGeo has treated us to some gorgeous wildlife footage. Creatures grazing, napping, hunting, and playing, all filmed by drones or particularly brave camera operators.
Disney managed to recreate that feeling here; this movie was a visual marvel.
To my knowledge, 100% of the movie was CGI, and with the exception of a wonky 3-second scene of a giraffe eating a leaf, I would have believed that Disney had simply hired the world’s most impressive team of animal trainers and gone out to the savanna.
For the quality and true-to-life nature of this movie, they could have gone with “National Geographic Presents: The Lions of Pride Rock” as their alternate title, and if you took out the scenes of the lions mouthing words, you could easily play this as a nature documentary and I’d believe it was.
Oddly, there was more than one scene where the image wasn’t crisp and clean. Considering it was entirely made in a studio and will inevitably get a 4K disc release, I don’t understand how every shot wasn’t flawlessly sharp. A vast majority of it was crystal clear; it’s that some scenes weren’t, and that stood out.

Now, whether this was part of their attempt at realism, or maybe the studio just didn’t think about it during development, but the colors weren’t saturated. The colors we saw were probably very true-to-life, but they didn’t pop. The savanna just looked like a bunch of tans and dusty greens. The sunrises and sunsets didn’t have nearly enough red in them. We live in a world of HDR photography and color-tweaking artists, so colors not flooding your retina really stands out.
While Mufasa and Scar were easily distinguishable in the sunlight, they kept putting the two of them in shadows, which made it much harder to differentiate.
All of the lionesses looked the same, but they did so in the animated movie too, so that’s not really a change.

The voice-acting for this was good. Most importantly, James Earl Jones resumed his role as Mufasa, and gave it the appropriate gravitas. John Oliver was a good choice for Zazu (who actually looked like a hornbill in this movie, instead of a toucan in the last one). Keegan-Michael Key and Eric André played the two silly hyenas. Billy Eichner and Seth Rogan brought new life to Timon and Pumba, adding some of their modern comedy without changing the characters. Donald Glover’s Simba and Beyoncé’s Nala were fine when talking to anyone else, but somehow when it was those two talking to each other, it was weirdly stilted. Chiwetel Ejiofor voiced Scar, which worked, but he’s no Jeremy Irons and you can feel it.

The soundtrack was everything you remember from the first movie, slightly remixed and without the fancy choreography.
Except for “Be Prepared.” Scar spoke the first verse like he was in some kind of slam poetry event, and that’s it. You could make an argument that, thematically, the song doesn’t fit anymore, as it was easily the most “dramatic” song of the original and included rows of synchronized, marching hyenas, but that would be a stupid argument. You could also claim that since the original was utilizing some Nazi imagery on purpose, and we’re dealing with an unfortunate resurgence of Neo-Nazis, so it was cut for the sake of some political message. That would also be a stupid argument.
Short and sweet: shame on you, director Jon Favreau, for cutting my favorite song and leaving all the others untouched.

For the sound effects: good, I guess. I felt like there wasn’t nearly as much bass in the audio as there should have been. My seat didn’t rumble when the lions roared, or when the wildebeests stampeded, and even the opening song didn’t quite pack the punch I was expecting.

According to other critics, the most noticeable issue with this flick were the facial expressions. They claimed that by not being cartoony, it wasn’t clear what the characters were feeling.
I call rubbish.
With “District 9” (2009), we saw an excellent example of CGI aliens who could really only communicate their emotions through their eyebrows; Disney did the same here. Between the voice acting and the eyebrows, I thought it was quite easy to understand the emotions of any given scene.
That said: I also know what emotions were supposed to be in each scene. I suppose if you’d never seen the animated version you might have a harder time, so this might actually be a blind spot for me.
I think the animators could have used more ear motion to convey feelings, but I don’t know if lion ears move the way house cat ears do, so that might not have been a possibility for the sake of realism.

All in all, this movie was good.
Was it a Disney cash-grab for a Gen-Z audience who now have kids? Probably. I still saw it in theaters, obviously.
It’s okay for matinee pricing; the visuals will still look really nice on your HD or 4K TV when you rent it.
It almost lost a claw for taking out “Be Prepared.”