These characters speak lines that contain emotion but show none of it themselves, even when they’re the exact same lines as before. And when they’re new, they show no old or new emotion: Scar and Simba talk like they’re still in separate recording booths. As with the opening song, this movie thinks that how a movie appears visually has no impact on how it feels, or what kind of story it’s telling: its realism never once factors into its emotions (it could have increased in brutality, for instance, or omitted the sillier characters). It aggressively goes against Disney’s founding principles of the visualization of personality. In doing so, The Lion King (2019) has almost no personality that we don’t put there ourselves.
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Animation history is a code that’s difficult to crack, but Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the key. The reason isn’t its length or beauty but the essential decision made by its artists, which was to think of animation as more than just a medium to make the same movies of the era without actors. Snow White could have been made as a painted version of any romance of that time (you can even see it in Snow White and the Prince specifically: that potential to be nothing more than an animated re-creation of realness). But with the dwarfs and the animals, Disney realized the possibility of animation to do more than replicate the real world: these characters take the form of their personalities through drawing; they are visualizations of their own spirit, as real people can never be. Disney hid the most important scene in the history of animation behind a gag: the scene where Snow White guesses the names of the dwarfs by looking at them. It’s not just funny: it’s a visual demonstration of Disney’s entire idea of this medium. Snow names them by the personality that she can see, because they were drawn that way, and because Disney wanted us to be able to do this from that moment on without even trying. He wanted us to know the playful inhibitions of Bambi, or the cultured reticence of Lady, or the disarming daintiness of Scar, not by speaking these things into existence, but by drawing that personality into the character itself. In one scene, Snow White defined the creative force of the entire art of animation, conditioning us to watch it on its own artistic terms for the rest of time; its personality is a shadow of its creator’s childlike unconsciousness. It is Walt Disney’s “anima” in his animation.
This introduction doesn’t seem like I’m introducing a review of a new movie; in a sense, I’m not. The Lion King (2019), when reviewed as a new movie, divides people not only on its quality but on what aspects of its quality matter. Many will praise its realism, and many others will defy it to remake a movie that they have always considered perfect, lamenting every tiny change even as their main complaint seems to be that it’s a copy of something dear to them. They’re not wrong to be trapped by that contradiction: it’s a confusing position to be in. And it makes most frames of reference to critique this movie contradictory: a complaint of change being vulnerable to the complaint of newness. This is why I’ve framed my opinion with something different. Despite debates to the contrary, The Lion King (2019) is an animated film. And it’s the very first animated film made by Disney whose artistic ambitions have regressed backwards beyond Snow White. The Lion King (2019) isn’t bad animation. It’s de-animation.
The problems begin within one second. The opening song, “The Circle of Life,” begins playing and it should be immediately clear to anyone who’s watched the original since they were Simba’s age that it’s the same recording. I asked someone with a trained ear to listen to each version to make sure. Though the singer is different, the choir and backing track, the song itself, is the same. To use the same song against different animation, this movie seems to believe that the visuals and the sound are mutually exclusive: it values them separately, and so it believes that it makes no difference if one is changed and the other stays the same. Applied to the opening, this idea took me right out of the movie in the first seconds; that won’t be the case for everyone. But this idea corrodes the entire film: these creators believed that they could change things, some as big as the art style of the whole film, and take no responsibility for the inconsistencies those changes create when what’s around those changes remains the same. They assumed we could feel the same emotion for the same story, no matter what they did to it.
The script’s tiniest changes reflect this process. For instance, little Simba and Nala (JD McCrary and Shahadi Wright Joseph) want to sneak off to the elephant graveyard. They tell their parents that they’re really going to the watering hole. Nala knows that Simba is lying. Has anyone ever complained that this is “unrealistic”? The creative team of the new movie sat around trying to figure out, not how to get personality into the faces of real animals, but what tiny lines they could tweak to address quibbles. Here they add in Nala saying, “Simba, you hate water,” to show how she figures out that he’s lying. It’s such an innocuous thing, such a pitiful little change. Yet it becomes obvious and desperate because of how little sense it makes. If Simba hated water, his mom would know that he was lying about going to the watering hole; two minutes after Nala says that line, the cubs are deep into the upbeat song, “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King,” and at the point in the cartoon where they run and splash through a river, the script just recreates it, even though Simba “hates water” now.
Small as it is, this little line reveals the whole problem with this remake, which is the inability to think of the context of any aspect of the art that they’re remaking. Other than a new scene and rearranged lines, these are the only things they changed and thought about, and none of them work. If this script was written by people thinking about their own idea, they never would have accidentally put in a scene where a character who hates water happily plays around in water two minutes after we found this out about him; hating water would have come up later, perhaps by adding in the scene from the Broadway show where Simba has to save Timon from drowning and it reminds him of the gorge. But it never comes up at all because they’re not thinking about it. They’re not comparing their new lines to the existing movie, and they’re not making a new movie to conform to their new lines.
And then they’re getting rid of scenes that, in my opinion, are non-optional in a re-creation, such as the scene in which Rafiki (John Kani) describes Simba’s relationship to his past in cryptic wisdom. It’s the height of his character arc; it’s the most important scene in the movie next to Mufasa’s lesson about the Circle of Life. Why would this be removed? That’s one version of the question. Here’s another: why would it be removed and not replaced with anything?
The method of making this movie is reprehensible. Sitting around debating the most pointless changes based on two decades of fan nitpicks is a luxurious position for these creators next to the animators being forced to spend hundreds of thousands of hours rendering up a copy of another movie with excessive detail; it recalls the royal architects commanding their slave armies. Even their animation isn’t satisfying because director Jon Favreau aggressively omits from his remake every interesting shot or dramatic composition in the original movie. When Simba realizes that the wildebeest stampede is coming toward him, the cartoon does an excessive push-in shot with Simba’s face darkening and widening; I was wondering beforehand how shots like this would be achieved in CGI. The new film briefly shows Simba’s unemotive face, and shortens the push-in. The new movie doesn’t just copy the original: it reduces and flattens it. It’s like they specifically pruned out any shot with an interesting perspective or different camera movement, knowing that people would insert them anyway with their minds, so the effort wasn’t worth it. I’ve rarely seen any film made with less passion for film.
The same applies to the dialogue. This script technically contains many of the same words as the original, but it lacks all of its composition: the lines smash together like crowded teeth. The new film has no dramatic pauses, no art of conversation. It doesn’t sound like speech: it sounds like Shakespeare being read line by line in a middle school classroom. The Lion King (2019) manages to take seasoned actors and make them seem like amateurs reading familiar lines in a hurry; even James Earl Jones, who played Mufasa before, sounds passive in the role. No one is being given the chance to feel these parts.
I want to compare the tiniest part of the same conversation to illustrate this point. The end of the conversation between Simba and Scar in the gorge in the original looks like this:
Scar: Ohhh, yes. Lucky Daddy was there to save you, eh? Oooo … and just between us, you might want to work on that little roar of yours, hmm?
Simba: Oh … okay … Hey, Uncle Scar? …Will I like the surprise?
Scar: Simba, it’s to DIE for.
The new film consciously rewrites this conversation but removes its nuances, its pauses: in short, it removes the character. Here’s the same bit of speech from the new film:
Scar: You’ll get it, Simba. It just takes time. I’ll check on you later.
Simba: Dad will be so proud, won’t he?
Scar: It’s a gift he’ll never forget.
A transcript of the original would be harder to type out because humans don’t speak perfectly in rhythm or sync; they leave unfinished thoughts and forget punctuation and use a lot of pauses. This is what changes a line of dialogue into speech. If they already had the lines of their life written out, though, they could just read them like a recitation. That’s what The Lion King (2019) does. Its conversations have no pauses or beats of emotion: they’re all workman lines, like everyone knows them already, like just getting through them is enough. I knew a middle school drama teacher who would have stopped them and said, “Very good; now read them again, but this time, with feeling.” This script took the character out of the words.
And that’s what happens to the personalities of the characters too. This should be the biggest complaint that people have. They are indistinguishable not only from each other but from themselves: Simba’s face is not different when he greets Nala as when his father dies. They have no capacity to seem happy or sad except by the inflection of the voice, but that voice isn’t animated into the face. The animators made no attempt (or were given no chance) to replicate The Jungle Book’s (2016) ingenious middle ground between an uncanny human face and a static animal face, where the lips and the muscles of the lips took on subtly human characteristics so that the speech looked natural, but not so much that it looked strange. The effect they’re going for in The Lion King (2019) seems to be the “Mr. Ed” effect, with a real animal’s mouth flopping open and closed (they used to use peanut butter). This becomes especially egregious when they’re singing: a real lion has no way of wrapping its lips around human words. The result is the opposite of animation.
These characters speak lines that contain emotion but show none of it themselves, even when they’re the exact same lines as before. And when they’re new, they show no old or new emotion: Scar and Simba talk like they’re still in separate recording booths. As with the opening song, this movie thinks that how a movie appears visually has no impact on how it feels, or what kind of story it’s telling: its realism never once factors into its emotions (it could have increased in brutality, for instance, or omitted the sillier characters). It aggressively goes against Disney’s founding principles of the visualization of personality. In doing so, The Lion King (2019) has almost no personality that we don’t put there ourselves.
It’s difficult to pick an example because every moment of the film is one. Consider one frame. Simba has disappointed his father. He notices that he stepped into his father’s huge pawprint; he looks up as his father calls him, and thinks not only that he’s in trouble, but that he’ll never live up to the huge foot that made that print. The scenes are identical in both versions, except for the personality. To anyone who has used the argument that the new The Lion King brings this movie to a new generation of viewers, ask yourself of this comparison of the exact same frame in both versions: would you know what Simba is feeling, would you know the meaning of this scene at all, if you had not seen the other one?
Mentally inserting the emotions from the drawn version of The Lion King into the new one is how some people have tricked themselves into accepting a de-animated version of another film. Taken as its own movie, without the knowledge of the characters from our childhoods, the new The Lion King would not have the same following as its predecessor.
That’s because Jeff Nathanson’s script doesn’t conceive The Lion King (2019) as a new film, less even than a twist on an old one. He barely tweaks it, slipping in new lines here and there like a builder shifting a few stones and then absently wondering why the building’s structure is off all of a sudden. Here’s another new line that creates unnecessary contradictions. Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor) says, “If only I’d gotten to the gorge in time,” at Mufasa’s eulogy, so that later Sarabi (Alfre Woodard) can say, “How could you see the look in Mufasa’s eyes, if you didn’t make it to the gorge in time?” This is all new, made, I assume, with the intention of fixing a scene in the original that’s a little awkward and forced. But it conflicts with things that don’t change, such as Zazu’s (John Oliver) presence with Scar at the gorge. Zazu would know that Scar was lying. Nathanson goes out of his way to fix a scene, and not only inflames and makes more obvious a “flaw” in the original, but fixes nothing. The new version makes even less sense.
From the first note of a song recorded twenty-five years ago to every tiny new line to a completely new art style played over re-creations of the same images, the problem with The Lion King (2019) is not change, but the inability of its creators to consider the consequences of changes on a pre-existing movie. They hope that the art style has no effect on the movie’s feeling, in the same way that they hope a new line won’t ever affect an old plot. They are never correct.
This doesn’t mean that The Lion King (2019) does nothing well, but by doing the exact same movie with no understanding of what gives life to animation, none of its positives matter. I like Pumbaa a lot in the new version: I think Seth Rogen’s spirit animal may actually be a farting pig, because I think he’s the most natural voice in the film. The way the film interprets Scar’s song, “Be Prepared,” will probably irk fans of the original. I actually think it’s a minor triumph: instead of the cartoonish, over-the-top light show with hyena backup singers swinging their butts around and goose-stepping, which works in one version but wouldn’t have worked in this one, the song has been reinterpreted as an intense, quietly aggressive call-to-arms. Ejiofor sings it in speech, and sounds like he’s actually sinking his teeth into an interpretation of the role. That part is in the spirit of what a true remake would do: reinterpreting old visuals with intense realism, and altering the emotions in context to give the actors room to create their own new performance.
These things are tiny against the truth of the whole film. It’s difficult to describe the feeling of intense boredom that washes over you watching The Lion King (2019). The newness of the visuals robs the act of rewatching the film of all its nostalgia, its panache, its palette, but the story is so similar that you know every single thing that’s going to happen. I found myself drifting off during “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” which inexplicably takes place during the daytime. I believe that it must be a limitation of the new animation because other scenes (Mufasa’s rescue of Simba from the hyenas) have also been converted into daylight. I believe the concept of rendering the world realistically made it difficult to find light sources (the only non-artificial one would be the moon), and I think they ran into problems seeing the characters on-screen at night. That’s my metaphor for the whole project: even something as seemingly simple as re-animating a song with “tonight” in the title becomes laughable because the song was written for a different movie; they had to make it take place in the day, which makes it a song that they never would have written if this was an original movie. They knew people would laugh at them. But they had given themselves no choice.
If something as minute as a song title is incompatible with the CGI, imagine how long we could discuss every micro-mistake of the emotions, every lifeless conversation, every movement that under-moves because of the limitations of reality, every conflict between a new line and an old plot device. I believe they even told the actors to emote less so that it didn’t clash so much with the realistic animal faces: my evidence is James Earl Jones, who would not be a fan-favorite character or a memorable personality if this new version was the only version. He sounds uncommitted, and that’s a word that Jones has never earned in his entire career.
As you would not accept a picture of a lion as a real lion, I urge you not to accept an image of The Lion King as equal to what you imagine about it. The artists who were overworked to render up every sky and pebble as close to reality as possible deserve better than a story that was given less thought than an episode of the Disney XD Lion Guard show. The worst Disney remake of all time deserves to be called what it is: a scam. The people responsible for this film know no more about Disney’s animation than a bootlegger knows about the artist he’s ripping off. Remember Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho? Was anyone arguing that this kind of re-creation was noble, that it brought movies to a new generation, before Disney told them to think that?
There’s something at stake here, something bigger than The Lion King: this is about refusing to accept a company of cynical nitpickers, changing tiny elements based on fan response and trivial complaints and rendering everything else verbatim in the hope of getting the least resistance. It’s about rejecting a movie that was given no real thought, which is hitchhiking on other people’s accomplishments, and overburdening artists to accomplish every single new element of the film, with the writer and director putting their feet up on a tracing desk and getting rid of anything that sounds kind of hard to do. This is the moment we have to stop giving them a free ride for doing nothing but taking the personality out of someone else’s art. Animation history may depend on it.
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Unless otherwise indicated, all images are screenshots from the DVDs, trailers, or TV promos of the 1994 and 2019 versions of The Lion King.
