Lion King remake review: Roaring visuals, but the execution is a hairball

You have definitely seen The Lion King before. That sentence applies to both the 1994 Disney classic and next week’s CGI-filled remake. This new version, premiering worldwide on Friday, July 19, has been remade in such a stark, scene-by-scene manner that there’s no point in slapping a spoiler warning on this article. Every character from the box-office-dominating Disney classic has returned to retread every plot point and sing every familiar, chart-topping song.

But Disney wants very badly to convince you that you have not seen The Lion King like this, and in some ways, that sales pitch is accurate. I can confirm that the latest film from Director Jon Favreau is enough of a technical masterpiece to usher in a new level of the question, “is that CGI?” Photorealistic flora and fauna pack each frame of this film, which Favreau directed, in part, by putting on VR headsets and aiming his virtual camera at raw digital assets.

But while Favreau clearly has the right technology⁠—and the right attitude about how to render his star characters—his efforts are hobbled by the baggage that is a beloved, bubbly Disney film.

Holy wildebeest!

I hate to overuse the word “magical”—especially in a world where tech entrepreneurs attach that word to things as asinine as social-mobile cat feeders—but this year’s Lion King earns the M-word early on. This film begins the same way as the original: the light of a new day shines upon Mufasa’s animal kingdom, and every animal in the (assumedly) Kenyan region marches toward the unveil of their next king.

Scrutinize each of these marching animals, and you’ll find the tiniest gaps between reality and computer rendering—just enough to pick out the unrealistic parts. Some awkward ambient occlusion here; an unnatural animation flutter there. If you’re as jaded a CGI critic as I am, this stuff will stand out amidst a glorious crowd of incredibly lifelike animals, all romping through thick grasslands and over realistic puddles.

Then tiny baby Simba appears. His CGI debut revolves around tight zooms on his glassy, watery eyes, his thick fur, and the incredible interplay of light and shadow from a crack in his cave-like enclosure. Then he’s picked up by his parents to be presented from the top of a cliff, and it’s here that little Simba bobbles, claws, and wiggles like a real lion cub. The timing, the awkwardness, and the cuteness of this newborn moment shine like something out of the most unbelievable nature documentary that has ever been filmed. Yeah, it’s magical as hell.

I can easily point to a dozen such “holy wildebeest” rendering moments through the course of the two-hour film, and each revolves around some sort of ridiculous recreation of an animal, nearby environs, or a combination. Simba romps through a dusty, wind-stricken desert, and the particles and wind interact with his fur in mind-blowing fashion. Rain pours over the primary cast during a tense, end-of-film showdown, and water gathers and drips over every animal’s newly bedraggled fur. Simba escapes a harrowing hyena attack inside a crumbling cave, and every ray of light hovers in the air thanks to dazzling dust-particle effects. Chronicling each of these high points could take a while.

Can’t feel the love

But that incredible quality is interrupted pretty early on by a curious direction choice: a “realistic” approach to animals’ faces when they talk like humans. While the film applies tight zooms and cinematic camera angles to every conversation between characters, all voiced by popular actors and comedians, the animals’ mouths and eyes do not veer from their proper anatomy. Eyes do not bulge; mouths do not open wide.

On paper, that sounds like absolutely the right call. Favreau’s photorealism efforts would probably look ridiculous if the main characters’ faces turned into exaggerated CGI explosions of emotion as soon as someone piped up. The problem, really, is that the vocal direction team didn’t get this memo. Every actor talks or sings as if they’re going to receive the typical Disney animation treatment, all overemphasizing their lines with an expectation that they’ll look like a character in Toy Story or Frozen. Instead, this excited dialogue is met with animal mouths that look like they’ve been filled with peanut butter, and they have the dead eyes to match.

Favreau’s previous CGI-filled Disney remake, The Jungle Book, avoided this issue by focusing largely on a human actor and perhaps also by having so many animal characters in that film better resemble humans. Baloo, in particular, lucked out with a slightly goofy facial rendering pipeline and actor Bill Murray to match. Seth Rogen as Puumba is the only Lion King actor to get anywhere near Murray’s physical-comedy potential in this film.

The biggest exception to this Lion King remake rule is a surprising one: the sequence attached to the love song “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.” You might expect this to be the dorkiest-looking sequence of them all, but instead, its characters romp and flirt without having their mouths synced to the song. Here, the visuals sell the lyrics by modeling the courtship of real-life lions with a few playful, Disney-like flourishes—but nothing as weird as a real-life approximation of, say, the Lady & the Tramp kiss.

It was after this sequence that a light bulb went off in my mind. What if The Lion King was more like this? What if the dialogue was pulled away from the characters more often, via tricks like narration, flashbacks, or sneaky camera angles, so that we could better savor the glorious sub-Saharan vistas and the filmmakers’ ridiculous attention to animal anatomy and behavior?

Not quite king of the jungle

As a result, The Lion King feels less like a cinematic success and more like a technical proof of concept. Watching this film made me giddy about the next film to come, and if Disney were smart about it, they’d give Favreau free rein to build a new epic from scratch. Give him the keys to a complete pipeline of story, dialogue, music, and setting, and I’m confident he’d nail the results.

Lion King gets close, but not quite. Its mismatch of emotive acting and dead-eyed characters may prove boring to kids (my screening was full of distracted kids either loudly complaining or running around the theater, as one anecdote). The vocal performances do very little to bring new life to well-trodden ground, and that’s not helped by a script stuck severely to the source material. (2016’s Jungle Book remake effectively rebuilt its familiar characters from scratch and was all the better for it.)

Billy Eichner is the clear standout here, doing so much with his version of Timon that he effectively surpasses Nathan Lane’s tremendous 1994 turn (and as a fan of both Lane and Eichner, I’m flabbergasted to type that). But everyone else in the acting booth is either ho-hum or disastrous, with Beyoncé Knowles turning in a shockingly wooden performance.

If you’re for any reason dragged to a Lion King screening by family members, I believe you’ll still find enough to enjoy and appreciate. But if you have the option, wait to watch the new film’s 4K Blu-ray at your home on mute—and enjoy the better-acted, better-paced 1994 cartoon on a couch in the meantime. (If you really need to watch a feature-length film about furry CGI animals in the real world, I recommend Pokemon Detective Pikachu.) https://arstechnica.com/?p=1534163