THE LION KING - Disney's "Disastrous," "Hideous," "Unnecessary" Remake

[AndyDursin]

Much like the pointless BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, here's another note-for-note Disney remake, this time in "live action" (CGI), but essentially the same exact story, with the same exact songs. Even the same exact shots!

Sure it will make a fortune, but what's the point other than making money for its studio?

[Paul MacLean]

How uninteresting.

[Monterey Jack]

The point is a guaranteed billion-and-a-half return on Disney's investment.

Until people stop seeing these, Disney will keep making them.

[mkaroly]

Looks awful...but then again I thought the animated feature was awful. Lol...PASS!

[AndyDursin]

The mixed reviews pretty much sum up what was expected -- a basic note-for-note remake that's photorealistic and utterly pointless. Add an original Beyonce song for an Oscar nomination, and Disney can print up money for its shareholders. Thankfully, Theo would rather watch LAND OF THE LOST so I'm going to be safe from having to pay to see it.

This review is a great read...

The Lion King, Disney’s latest attempt to make a new hit from the blueprint of one of its old ones, begins the exact same way as the 1994 animated smash on which it’s based: with a blood-red sun peaking over the horizon of the African Serengeti, a single chanting voice rising with it. What follows is a shot-for-shot recreation of that film’s spectacular opening musical number, “The Circle Of Life,” in which all the beasts in the kingdom take their place at the foot of a jutting rock, ready to pay respect to the young predator that will soon be calling them prey.

There’s a key difference, however. This time, the antelopes and giraffes and scurrying ants look exactly like actual antelopes and giraffes and scurrying ants. And that proves to be both the major technological achievement of the movie and its great miscalculation, its fundamental folly. The scene’s dramatic apex is supposed to be the interaction between the mighty lion Mufasa (a returning James Earl Jones, because who could replace him?) and the wise mandrill Rafiki (John Kani), who’s come to present the king’s newborn son to the world. But both characters have been so authentically rendered, with the limited range of facial motion their respective species possess, that we’re essentially just watching two animals stare blankly at each other. The emotional connection between them is entirely theoretical, supplied only by context or maybe by memories of what their hand-drawn ancestors more clearly conveyed.

Technically, this new Lion King is as much a cartoon as the old Lion King; it’s been created entirely on computers, and features nary a single life-form or landscape not made from 1s and 0s. But like Cinderella, Beauty And The Beast, and the recent, embarrassing Aladdin, it’s a lavish Disney remake that detrimentally thrusts material conceived for animation into an effectively live-action world. At least those films anchored their nostalgia trips to real personalities. There’s almost nothing recognizably human in The Lion King, which labors under the bizarre misconception that anyone needed a photorealistic take on the Shakespearean struggle between talking, singing lions. Joyless, artless, and maybe soulless, it transforms one of the most striking titles from the Mouse House vault into a very expensive, star-studded Disney Nature film.

Is there a point here, beyond squeezing a few million more out of a tale that’s already been Broadway adapted and direct-to-video sequelized and prequelized? The Lion King wants to make us gape, like those genuflecting herbivores, at its state-of-the-art craftsmanship—at how far animation has come in 25 years. Yet there’s something distracting, even uncanny-valley unnerving about hearing, say, John Oliver’s panicked voice projecting out from the clicking beak of a dead-eyed hornbill. The effect isn’t so different from what you’d get from dubbing over the chewing maw of a real animal, Mister Ed-style. And the lack of expressiveness becomes a real liability when it comes to caring about our hero, prince Simba (JD McCrary as a cub, Donald Glover as a grown lion), who sports the same placid, unchanging cat face when he’s confronted by the defining tragedy of his childhood as when he’s pouncing on a beetle.

One-time Swinger Jon Favreau, now a go-to guy for special-effects showcases (did anyone see that coming, even after Iron Man?), offered a similarly lifelike menagerie in his dry run to the gig, The Jungle Book. Caught in its own uncanny valley between fidelity and deviation, that movie wanted to be a direct remake but also its own thing. The Lion King settles, unimaginatively, for the former. It’s more faithful, even, than those carbon copies of Beauty And The Beast and Aladdin, which bulked up their running times with (unnecessary) subplots and (forgettable) new songs. Here, it’s basically scene for scene the same plot, as young Simba becomes a pawn in the Claudius-like scheme of Mufasa’s resentful runt-of-the-litter brother, Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor), then flees the pride and reinvents himself as a carefree bachelor to avoid facing his past. Even those who consider the original a towering classic of the Disney Renaissance would probably concede that it’s not for the film’s story, with its skimpy second act and weird, there-goes-the-neighborhood class politics.

No, The Lion King endures because it’s gorgeously animated, mythically scaled, and packed with memorable songs. Yet however confidently he can oversee a big production, Favreau has almost no knack for spectacle, and over and over again, he botches scenes that soared in ’94. Early showstopper “I Just Can’t Wait To Be King” was practically a Busby Berkeley number. But because real animals could never stack on top of each other like that (silly!), the new version finds Simba and love interest Nala (Shahadi Wright Joseph at first, Beyoncé later) trading lines while… running through a stream. It’s not the only musical sequence that falls flat; Scar’s jaunty villain anthem “Be Prepared” has been totally gutted, whereas the Oscar-winning “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” now unfolds during the day, for some reason. Excepting the opening scene, Favreau makes no attempt to match the original’s extravagant angles and choreography: While Scar’s hyena cronies once menacingly emerged from the sockets of an elephant skull, here they just kind of wander into frame.

It’s as if every creative decision were subordinate to the film’s misguided insistence on realism, on keeping the mannerisms and movements of these magically intelligent creatures “believable.” And so, all the pleasures are not just secondhand but diminished: We’re watching a hollow bastardization of a blockbuster, at once completely reliant on the audience’s pre-established affection for its predecessor and strangely determined to jettison much of what made it special. Even the vocal performances, delivered by Favreau’s high-profile celebrity cast, suffer by comparison, perhaps because the actors are forced to downshift to match the more narrow emotional spectrum of their digital avatars. This means, for example, that Ejiofor abandons all the campy relish Jeremy Irons brought to Scar, reducing the heavy to a single note of bitterness, while Jones dims the regal intensity like a stage actor who’s started to grow a little bored playing the same role night after night. Ultimately, only Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen, as slacker sidekicks Timon and Pumbaa, make much of an impression; their funny, possibly ad-libbed banter feels both fresh and true to the spirit of the characters—the perfect remake recipe. Just don’t look too hard at their character designs. They’re realistic, hideously.

D+

https://film.avclub.com/be-prepared-for ... 1836271258

[AndyDursin]

Another outright pan...

Disney’s Remake Is a Disastrous Plunge into the Uncanny Valley

https://www.indiewire.com/2019/07/the-l ... 202157153/

[Monterey Jack]

Having re-watched the original just the other day for the first time in close to a decade (I think the last time I watched it was during its theatrical reissue in 2011), I was struck anew by the painterly beauty of hand-drawn Disney animation, where the luminous imagery wasn't "photorealistic", and yet every character's inner emotion was brilliantly realized by the animators. Here's Simba reacting to the mixture of sorrow, guilt and fear he feels when Scar intimates that his father's death was -- intended or not -- his fault:



Now, here's 2019 Simba's face:



It's...just a lion. Yeah, lion cubs are "cute", but there's no glimmer of human expression breaking through that digital skin. To quote Cap'n Quint, "He's got dead eyes, like a doll's eyes..." And it's not like it's impossible to have a digitally-created character be emotive...look at Andy Serkis' Gollum, or Caesar from the Planet Of The Apes movies, who looked like a "realistic" chimpanzee and yet you knew exactly what his character thought or felt through his amazingly expressive facial tics.

People seem to forget that the 2011 reissue of The Lion King pulled in over $100 million at the box office, which proves that what "the people" really want is their childhood favorites available to watch on the big screen, not these ghastly, soulless digital Xeroxes with all of the color and liveliness leached out. This wave of live-action remakes is every bit as detrimental to the studio's legacy as those direct-to-video "cheapquels" were in the 90s and throughout the 00s. In fact, they're far worse, because they're spending so lavishly on movies that, despite the money they bring in during their runs in theaters, will be completely forgotten and ignored in favor of the original animated films decades from now. It's noteworthy that all of the Disney merch I've seen for Aladdin recently has featured the familiar cast from the animated film, not their forgettable live-action versions.

[AndyDursin]

Right on MJ. As a parent of a 5 year old I also have no motivation to bring my son to a film where the action in THE LION KING is literalized and more realistic, including its deaths.

And who would've thought the best reviewed movie of their three remakes this year would be ALADDIN?? Totally disposable all three of them, nobody will remember them a year from now.

[AndyDursin]

From the Indiewire review:

With the possible exception of 2015’s “Cinderella,” which was touched with just enough magic to feel like a new wrinkle on an old fairy tale, all of Disney’s live-action rehashes have been faint echoes of their animated predecessors. But “The Lion King” isn’t an echo, it’s a stain. This zombified digital clone of the studio’s first original cartoon feature is the Disney equivalent of Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho.”

...It’s the work of a studio that’s gobbled up the rest of the film industry and is still hungry for more. “The Lion King” feels less like a remake than a snuff film, and a boring one at that.

[Monterey Jack]

Cinderella remains one of the only recent Disney remakes that actually felt like its own thing, and didn't overdose on "woke" updating of the material (why is the majority of the new Lion King voice cast African-American, other than pandering?). I also liked The Jungle Book, because that, too, didn't feel exactly like the animated film, and at least that had an actual, live-action boy in the midst of the digital bombast.

[Monterey Jack]

Right on MJ. As a parent of a 5 year old I also have no motivation to bring my son to a film where the action in THE LION KING is literalized and more realistic, including its deaths.

Yeah, Mufasa's death traumatized a generation of tots 25 years ago, but re-created with photorealistic animals (and with a no-doubt far more punishing surround soundtrack for the wildebeest stampede) is gonna be a LOT rougher for younger and/or sensitive kids. At least this time there's gonna be a PG rating, which the original film frankly should have had, along with the later Hunchback Of Notre Dame (a G-rated film which had a song called "Hellfire" where the villain exposits about his raging boner for the heroine ).

[Paul MacLean]

I was never even that big a fan of the original. Whatever appeal it had was largely due to it drawing on a great story like Hamlet, but I've never felt it to be a "classic for the ages".

[AndyDursin]

Was never my favorite either. Interestingly, Theo didn't care for it at all. He liked FROZEN (among others) a lot more -- and it's kind of strange because he loves animals. Maybe just not singing animals!

[jkholm]

I thought I was the only one who thought THE LION KING was overrated. It's not a bad film but nowhere near as good as THE LITTLE MERMAID, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST or ALADDIN. The songs in particular are weak and not well integrated into the story.

[Monterey Jack]

4/10



Akin to watching a Fred Astaire dance routine where Fred has five-pound lead weights attached to each ankle, The Lion King '19 gets the routines down, but you can see the sweat of exertion throughout, and the whole enterprise ends up feeling slowed-down and strained to the point of exhaustion. Scenes that exploded with color, humor and pathos in the original -- by being buried under this technically-dazzling but emotionally-distancing digital skin -- now come across as cloddish, lethargic and not fun in the slightest. The voice acting is rote (even James Earl Jones sounds every bit as distressingly elderly as he did reprising Darth Vader in Rogue One a few years back, the effect as distracting as hearing an 80-something Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach dubbing the additional scenes plonked into The Good, The Bad & The Ugly as they reprise roles they played almost forty years earlier), the added bits of humor fall flat(ulence), and no matter how much these characters resemble actual African wildlife, there's no glimmer of relatable human emotion in their meticulously-detailed faces and eyes. It's like...would you find a Bugs Bunny cartoon funnier if he looked like an actual bunny? The creators of Bugs always viewed him as a human being who just wore a bunny costume, and that's what made him amusing to watch. Ditto for the original Lion King, which holds up a quarter-century later because these "cartooney" pen & ink lions have more relatable humanity than all of the digital processing power and millions of dollars expended by Disney in this desperately unnecessary cash-grab. The Nostalgia Critic's recent review of the original had a good gag at the end when he flashed the poster for Black Panther at the end when he talked about seeing the real "live-action" Lion King remake, and that's what's missing from this new film...anything that would distinguish it from just throwing the original in your DVD player and saving about $50 in tickets and snacks for the kids to see this soulless, eerie, creatively empty botch.