Review: Lion King
(based on the movie's Wikipedia summary)
How do I even review the live-action remake of the Lion King?
The plots of the remake and the original are almost identical. Whoever wrote the Wikipedia summary for the former just copied and pasted the latter and made a few tweaks. The only significant difference between the two is that Scar’s hyenas are now named Shenzi, Kamari and Aziz instead of Shenzi, Banzai and Ed. A Favreau interview highlighted elsewhere on the Wikipedia page says that the original trio was too stylised for the photorealistic 2019 movie. Sure!
Comparing the visuals of the movies is outside the scope of a Wikipedia-based review and thank God. The first Lion King was a vibrant work produced by an animation studio at the height of their power. The remake looks like a benchmark for a graphics card. Just watching a clip of the new “Hakuna Matata” was enough to depress me. I can’t imagine the sort of psychic damage the full movie would inflict.
How do you review this movie then? The answer is that you don’t review the movie because these live-action remakes aren’t actually meant to be reviewed. You can only engage with the business model that led to it.
That business model is essentially Disney daring you to hate your childhood favorites. “Remember that movie you loved when you were five? We’re going to make a new version of it with your favorite actors and favorite songs and glossy new visuals and it’ll be 5% more progressive so you’ll never cringe when you show it to your kids. How could you possibly hate this?”
On paper, this sounds good and in practice it’s at least fine. Even the Lion King remake, with its Pride Land 3DMark visuals, seems hard to hate considering it’s almost the exact same story as the original. Banzai and Ed are expendable, I’m sorry!
Some will say that Disney is “ruining their childhood” with their remakes but it’s more accurate to say that Disney is trying to patch their childhood. They’ve made Lion King v1.1 here. Bugs were fixed, features were introduced. “Added new Nala song based on user feedback. Boosted Timon’s Kinsey score by 1.”
People often defend reboots and remakes by saying that the original still exists. This is true but doesn’t tell the full story. You can stick with the old version if you like but as with any software update, ignoring it becomes harder and harder over time. The remake will become the default because it’ll be more widely available. When a new display standard comes around, you know which Lion King will support it first (or at all). And I hope you like the look of Neo Simba because it’s going to be his face you’ll be seeing at the theme park and on all the merch moving forward.
It’s natural and good for our favorite art to fade from the limelight. On a long enough timeline, it’ll happen to even the most successful works. What’s unique about Disney and their remakes, though, is that they’re actively speeding up the expiration of their movies. The Lion King was a must-watch kids’ movie for decades but it’s been essentially rendered obsolete overnight by the remake.
It’s not that I’m overly sentimental about The Lion King. I just hate how these remakes cheapen both the old and the new. Who can feel any sort of attachment to the remake when you can imagine it’ll be replaced in ten years by another remake? They made a billion dollars off this one already. There’s no stopping this train. There will always be some tech advance to justify returning to the well and there will always be an endless pool of celebrities willing to recreate their childhood movies.
The original that Disney taped over, meanwhile, will only be aired by Millennial parents insistent on showing their kids “the real version.” But even that type of behavior will be rare because who can stay mad at a children’s movie? It’s too much work to hang onto the old. All that will be left is just our collective exhaustion at a company that feels their art needs to be updated like a sedan. The new Lion King is smoother and cleaner but it’s just a prelude to something even more aerodynamic rolling off the assembly line soon.
RATING: 2 out of 5 “The Rock can play Maui again in the live-action Moana”s.