The Lion King is such a strange yet lifeless creation. It intends to be a slavish recreation of the original film right down to lifting large portions of the dialogue from the original movie yet it also decides to go for a more restrained "realistic" tone meant to keep it in line with the photorealistic computer-animated used to realize the project. Anything that could possibly be seen as silly has been exercised completely and this ends up meaning that any sense of fun or personality is missing. It's such an odd creative decision to go this route for a movie about lions who sing Elton John songs and it ends up resulting in a project that constantly reminds you of a far better movie you could be watching instead while failing to be a fun feature to watch on its own terms.
That sense of restrained realism that constantly drags down this version of The Lion King is owed entirely to the ultra-realistic computer animation which does have its impressive moments. An opening shot of a mouse scurrying across the African landscape certainly looks like it could have been ripped from reality, it's tremendously impressive. But The Lion King's animation reminded me of uses of Digital 3D technology in subpar movies; impressive for the first few minutes of the film but then the newness factor is gone and I'm left wondering if there's anything else going on here beyond some VFX wizardry. It doesn't help that, as part of the wall-to-wall realism, the animation ensures that individual character designs just aren't very interesting or even distinctive!
It's hard to tell individual hyenas and lions apart now and even if you can pull off the feat of properly guessing who is who, you'll be hard-pressed to tell what emotions they're experiencing. All of this money spent on photorealistic animation yet the characters in The Lion King might as well be statues given how static their faces and body movements are. This especially becomes apparent during the assorted musical numbers, which is where Lion King's slavish devotion to realism really becomes a problem. These animals ripped straight out of an Animal Planet TV show just aren't made for singing and dancing and this means their musical numbers contain some absolutely terrible choreography that primarily consists of characters like Simba or Scar just walking around on all fours without doing any kind of extra movement that's either reflective of their individual personalities or fun to watch.
There's little variety in the choreography between tonally different tunes like Hakuna Matata and Be Prepared, it always feels like The Lion King is doing the bare minimum in the area of musical number extravagance so that it can maintain a sense of ultra-realism for a story involving a flatulent warthog. Where's the fun? Where's the bombast? Even beyond the choreography, where's the editing and direction that could lend some life to what are supposed to be the big set pieces of the whole production? During these song-and-dance routines, as if to compensate for the lack of energy in the boring on-screen critters, Jon Favreau's camera constantly whooshes around the various animals to a distracting degree. I'm sorry The Lion King, but no matter how often or how frantically the camera zooms around, though, your lifeless rendition of I Just Can't Wait To Be King doesn't become any fun to watch.
Beyond the lifeless musical numbers, the camerawork in the movie is otherwise fine, but it's shocking how little in the way of personality the cinematography and direction have, though I suppose that's fitting for the overall movie. Despite having so many digital toys to play with, how come the camera angle and shot choices always feel so rudimentary? Opting to avoid coming off as stylish at any time in order to maintain a realistic aesthetic means that The Lion King can't even drum up a unique personality of its own on a filmmaking level, instead opting for hollow visual approaches to framing half-hearted homages to famous moments from the original movie. Even a talented crop of actors hired to play the various lions and meerkats can't manage to inject life into the proceedings, despite the fact that the likes of Donald Glover and Beyonce are on hand to voice the protagonists.
Both Glover and Beyonce, the latter playing Nala, do deliver fine vocals when it comes time for them to sing (I like that Glover adds a more relaxed Sinatra-esque crooning vibe to his Hakuna Matata reprise) but when delivering dialogue as their characters, they're never allowed the chance to establish their own personalities. Beyonce especially feels like she's wasted in a role that somehow fails to add much depth to the already thinly-written character from the original Lion King. They both still fare better than poor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who is handed nothing to do, not even a scrap of personality to work with, in his lifeless turn as Scar. On the plus side, Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen have a funny rapport built on a very natural back-and-forth speaking style as Timon & Pumbaa and it's amusing to hear John Oliver just play John Oliver as Zazu.
It'd be hyperbole to declare The Lion King a bad movie since it is a competently-produced movie in some respects (the sound work is especially noteworthy and at least some of the vocals in the musical numbers are solid) but when it comes to delivering any sense of character or spectacle, The Lion King always left me feeling cold. When remaking The Lion King, why not do something bold, something fresh, something new? Why do a movie that feels like the cinematic equivalent of just heated-up leftovers? It's especially strange to see The Lion King be such a cold movie since Jon Favreau's filmography is littered with lively movies like Elf, The Jungle Book, and Iron Man that flourished because of their discernably human protagonists, we saw ourselves in the antics of Tony Stark or Buddy the Elf and that made the respective journies they went on all the more emotionally satisfying. Meanwhile, all I see in this Lion King's version of Simba is a lot of computer hardware being put to lifeless use. I knew Hakuna Matata meant no worries but did it also have to mean no personality?
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