Searcy, Ar. (LP) — The original The Lion King (1994) was a cultural classic. It has gained many honors over the years, including but not limited to: highest-grossing animated film of all time, highest-grossing traditionally animated film of all time, two Academy Awards for its achievement in music, the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy – and being selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
With critical acclaim and extremely positive reviews across the board, you’d be hard-pressed to find something in this movie to complain about. While there has been a minor controversy or two, overall The Lion King (1994) has a near perfect record. Unfortunately, though, the same can’t be said for its 2019 CGI-animated remake. The Lion King (2019) has gotten, at best, very mixed responses. While receiving praise from critics for its visual effects, music, and vocal performances-particularly from Seth Rogen (Pumbaa) and Billy Eichner (Timon) – it also got devastating criticism for the lack of originality, as well as lack of facial motion in its characters. This reputation has spread, and ended up distancing people who had originally been open to the idea of seeing it. Upon being asked about her opinions of the movie, after seeing the trailers, Searcy High student Stella Engel responded, “I thought it looked really cool, but then everyone that saw it told me it was awful because the lions were so realistic and unemotional.”
Along with the rather obvious CGI upgrade, The Lion King (2019) is also noticeably longer than the original film. This seems to have been due to the decision to expand on and deepen the narrative of the film. In a response to early claims that the film would be a shot-for-shot remake of the original, director Jon Favreau stated on April 18, 2019 that some shots in the original film were so iconic that he couldn’t change them, and latter added that, “It’s much longer than the original film. And part of what we’re doing here is to (give it more dimension) not just visually but both story wise and emotionally.”(AP News.com) From the various interviews and peeks behind the curtain leading up to the film’s release, one would think that the people working on it were putting their all into making the project as great a movie as physically possible. The same creative team that made this move had also worked together on the CGI-animated remake of another classic Disney film, The Jungle Book (2016). In fact, that film’s success is what convinced the studio to give the OK for Favreau to go ahead with The Lion King (2019). So what went wrong?
It seems that there were a handful of major factors in the film’s giant flop. The most common is that the film lacks originality and heart, due to its relatively uncreative retelling of the original story and its CGI-animation making it so that the characters can’t emote as nearly as much, respectively. Compared to 2016’s The Jungle Book, while a few characters have somewhat expanded parts and more serious personalities (the hyenas certainly come to mind) for the most part this new remake doesn’t expand very much on the actual story, while Jungle Book leaned more into the darker tone and the different telling of the story from the original tale written by Rudyard Kipling. Also, while the CGI-animation forces both movies to struggle with their songs, The Jungle Book struggled less thanks to the smart decision to dial back on the musical aspect of the movie, allowing it to emphasize the more serious tone it was trying to go for. The songs of The Lion King, however, are much more beloved and are heavily intertwined with the story. It would be idiotic to not allow them to have as big of a part as they did in the original. The latter fact not only made balancing the music with the CGI even more of an uphill battle, but it also made said struggle that much more obvious. Speaking of the hyper-realistic CGI, there’s another reason why the 2019 remake has been given such a hard time by critics and audiences alike. The same company produced another film nearly 15 years ago that featured another CGI lion that much more well-received and didn’t have as nearly as many problems with its animation as The Lion King (2019). That lion’s name was Aslan.
2005’s movie adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe had a trick up its sleeve, however: the faces of Aslan and the other CGI animals were animated with human expressions, and it made a world of difference. Along with this rather obvious indication that the ‘live-action’ remake of the beloved 1994 film was less genuine retelling and more greedy cash grab, there’s another thing that many people have been complaining about: the all-star cast of the movie. Criticism after criticism has been aimed at the actors who voiced the movie’s main characters, especially how Chiwetel Ejiofor butchered ‘Be Prepared’ and his portrayal of Scar as a whole. Overall, Disney’s more realistic CGI-animated movies haven’t hit the mark as well as their animated counterparts, but The Lion King (2019) has displayed a new low for the studio. Let’s just hope they don’t ruin any more older animated classics.
