All the Technological Wizardry in the World Can’t Save Mufasa: The Lion King

I will say this for Mufasa: Those lions are cute as buttons. Especially the cubs. With that tactile fur and those tiny faces and those huge pleading eyes, you just want to squeeze the fuzzy little critters. Disney will surely sell a lot of plushies with this one. The technology on the previous Lion King — not the original 1994 animated Lion King, but the 2019 Jon Favreau “live-action” [sic] remake — was certainly impressive, with every whisker precisely captured and the photorealistic fur perfectly rendered. But technologically speaking, the new one leaves the previous iteration in the dust. The animals look realer than ever, and their mouths more convincingly match the spoken dialogue. For some viewers, that might be enough.

How ironic, though, that the better our technology has gotten, the less imaginative our films have become. Watch the original Lion King, the hand-animated one, and you’ll find a wild, rousing epic that in 88 short minutes seems to glide effortlessly from high tragedy to gonzo surrealism to coming-of-age adventure to stirring revenge thriller, populated with colorful and fascinating characters and composed of sequences that have entered our common cultural vernacular. You’ll find a movie. Favreau’s 2019 production might have made more than a billion dollars (1.6 billion, to be more precise), but it was a weak palimpsest, a fake and fancy nature doc lifelessly regurgitating the same story with little of the go-for-broke creativity that made the original such a high-water mark for the Disney Renaissance. Directed by Barry Jenkins, Mufasa: The Lion King looks impressive on a technical level, but it makes even less of an impression than its 2019 predecessor. Yes, it will surely make truckloads of money. Artistically speaking, it feels like an enormous wasted opportunity, especially given the talent involved.

As the title suggests, the new film is a prequel of sorts, an origin tale for how Mufasa (the royal lion patriarch whose death at the hands of his brother Scar is the inciting incident in The Lion King) came to rule the Pride Lands, and how he first met Scar. It’s framed as a tale told to Kiara (voiced by Blue Ivy Carter), the young cub of Simba (Donald Glover) and Nala (Beyoncé Knowles-Carter) by the wise old mandrill Rafiki (voiced by John Kani) one night while Kiara waits for her parents to come back from the birthing grounds with a new sibling. Unfortunately, also listening are the jocular warthog Pumbaa and his meerkat sidekick Timon (Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner), two characters who served as charming comic relief in the previous films but here indulge in a series of painfully unfunny bits that might make you question your sanity. I remembered them being really funny in the past; they were one of the few high points of Favreau’s film. This time around, their antics come off as unchecked and desperate improv, like the frantic pleadings of two coked-up comics dying onstage.

The main storyline follows young Mufasa (voiced by Braelyn and Brielle Rankins as a cub, and Aaron Pierre as a young adult) as he’s separated from his parents and winds up in a distant corner of the savanna, where he’s befriended by Taka (voiced by Theo Somolu as a cub, then by Kelvin Harrison, Jr.), the impulsive but shrinking son of the domineering Obasi (Lennie James) and his compassionate queen Eshe (Thandiwe Newton). Taka wants a brother, but Obassi wants to preserve their royal bloodline, so the father insists Mufasa spend all his time with Eshe and the females of the pride, who then proceed to teach him all they know. Their life is interrupted by the arrival of a group of pale, ghostly white lions, an outsider tribe of scavengers led by the ruthless Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), looking to occupy and control this land. Mufasa kills Kiros’s son, a blood vendetta is born, and away we go. Much of the film is a chase story, as Mufasa and Taka flee the outsiders and head off in search of a distant, possibly mythical land called Milele. Along the way, they’re joined by the lioness Sarabi (Tiffany Boone), whom Taka falls for, even though we know that she will eventually wind up with Mufasa.

Mufasa attempts an impossible balancing act. In some ways, the story is experienced best if you don’t know where the relationship between Mufasa and Taka, who will obviously grow up to be Scar, is headed. The framing device of a story told to Kiara, who wouldn’t know the events of the first film, thus makes some sense. But the movie also calls back (calls forth?) to the Lion King’s great moment of murderous betrayal: Taka and Mufasa repeatedly find themselves hanging onto each other at the edges of cliffs, rivers, and whatnot. Easter eggs, I suppose, for a story that technically hasn’t happened yet.

With its dedication to photorealistic animals, the film corners itself out of having any fun with its action sequences. There’s zero inspiration or danger in Mufasa’s fights, tumbles, chases, because its characters exist in a physically accurate, computerized netherworld of safe blandness: They have been stripped of their cartoonish exuberance on one end — they can’t do crazy, impossible, hand-animated things anymore — and their real-life menace on the other — this is a PG-rated kids’ movie, so the gruesome violence of actual snarling lions fighting is off limits. Maybe that’s why Jenkins anxiously tries to jazz up the action with fast, fancy, swooping camera movements. Or rather “camera” “movements”: In an all-digital universe, the fearsome weight of real life vanishes, and motion loses its novelty. A sweeping crane shot, which might have once conveyed freedom and expansiveness, has all the gravity of a cursor moving across a screen. Jenkins does give us one wonderful underwater fight which might be the exception that proves the rule. Floating in a deep, blue, otherworldly environment with their actions slowed down, the lions are suddenly freed from the limits of gravity, physics, realistic motion. It’s a poetic moment that comes just late enough in the film to serve both as a welcome respite and a sad reminder of what’s been missing. Sometimes, photorealism is the enemy of the real.

One might have expected the characters to fill in the spiritual gaps left behind by the limitations of blockbuster technology. There were surely opportunities there. As originally voiced by Jeremy Irons, Scar had a sinewy, slithery flamboyance that turned him into an unlikely gay icon. It would probably have been absurd for today’s Disney, an even more global and vertically integrated corporation than it was in 1994, to fully embrace that notion, but turning the character into a mewling, lovesick coward feels like an unnecessary reduction. Why not let the ambiguity live on, thereby enriching both the character and the storyline his actions will instigate?

Similarly, a film whose title includes the words Lion King probably has some issues if it keeps having to remind us that monarchy is bad, actually. This was also a problem with Favreau’s remake, which rewrote the stirring and admittedly old-fashioned sensibilities of the original into a kind of pseudo-democratic flatness; the words “Everything the light touches is our kingdom” now had additional qualifiers about how the land really belonged to no one. In Mufasa, it’s the bad guys who use the “everything the light touches” construction. But somehow, in this movie where only the most ignorant characters speak of such silly things as royal bloodlines, our hero has been gifted unique, maybe even supernatural powers of scent and sight and intuition to make it clear that, no, really, this guy is, in fact, a Chosen One. It’s sad watching what was once such a simple, effective, Shakespearean conceit get pretzel-knotted in an attempt to keep up with the times and maybe align with Disney’s menagerie of superheroes and Jedi knights. What are we doing here?

Jenkins is a talented artist who’s done great work in the past. At his best, he has a unique feel for suggesting complex emotions through cinematic means; it’s what makes him a natural filmmaker, as opposed to a mere storyteller who happens to make movies, or a general who mounts studio spectaculars (or worse, a marketer who can frame a shot or two). What’s most surprising about Mufasa is that it’s hard to find in it the patience and delicate wonder the director brought to works like Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk. In Jenkins’s pictures, so much is conveyed in silence, in the ways his people look at each other, or themselves. How does one do that, however, when the “people” are CGI lions, whose faces can never convey a similar range of emotions? Remove that dimension from this director’s work, and you lose entire worlds.

Squint hard, though, and you can perhaps see shades of the film Jenkins wanted to make. Mufasa could have been a love story; it’s not. It could have been about finding your place in the world; it’s not. It could have been about the overwhelming weight of responsibility; it’s not. It could have been about the sheer confusion of growing up, and seeing affection and love curdle into resentment and betrayal. Jeff Nathanson’s awkwardly literal-minded script pays occasional lip service to these ideas, but the movie itself fails to give us anything resembling an actual cinematic experience of them. (I’d mention the Lin-Manuel Miranda songs…but I’ve already forgotten them.) All the technological marvels of the world can’t breathe life into a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be.