The Lion King (regurgitated)

                                           “What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out?”

                                                     -          Alfred Hitchcock

I remember, as a wee lad, watching Disney’s The Lion King, the jewel in the crown of its renaissance period, in the cinema with my parents. My English was not very good at the time and I had to whisper to my mother to get an update on the latest story developments. However, I remember being thoroughly moved and enormously entertained.

I felt in my viscera the emotional beats of the movie – the scintillating peaks such as at the end of the opening, when Rafiki the baboon lifted Simba aloft on the tip of Pride Rock, displaying the future king to the genuflecting animals of the savanna. I also recall the gut wrenching gorge of when Simba is confronted with the lonely body of his father Mufasa, dead after saving him from the stampede.

 

Disney’s renaissance ended just before the turn of the Millennia, with modern classics such as The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and, most successful of them all, The Lion King. Now Disney has entered an odd phase of regurgitating its old favourites as ‘live action’. This has proved to be extremely profitable for Disney – with Aladdin and The Lion King both crossing the one billion dollar mark. Besides the lack of creativity (not original for Disney - one might point to the claims of plagiarism of the Japanese Kimba, King of the Jungle), this trend reeks slightly of artistic integrity surrendered for profit. But are the films any good? Or is Disney counting on the nostalgia of their hand-drawn classics to, like the Pied Piper, drive hordes of ex-children, to bring themselves and their children to spend wads of cash at the cinemas?

Christopher Plummer once remarked that working with Julie Andrews on the Sound of Music was like being hit over the head with a Valentine’s card. Watching the ‘live-action’ version of The Lion King evoked in me what I guess to be a similar feeling as the one Mr Plummer felt. The Valentine’s card bit is that the film was almost a scene-by-scene digital rendering of the original. The story beats are all the same and remembering them, and the fantastic music by Hans Zimmer and Elton John were all hooks that threatened to drag the child out that sat mesmerised in the cinema more than two decades ago. But almost the rest of the film was the bits that hit me over the head.

To get it out of the way, the visuals that the film achieved, digitally rendering the animals and scenery, are masterly. The way the hairs and mane moved in the wind, reflected light and matted when wet are done almost photo-realistically. However, one can’t help but ask whose bright idea it was to insist on photo-realism when portraying a film, aimed at children, of lions and hyenas involved with Shakespearean and Biblical drama and emotions.

One problem is that as humans, we are great at recognising subtle movements in other human faces, vital cues for emotional states. However, we are not so good at doing so with other animals. Hence it is not very easy to tell whether a lion is happy, sad, surprised, or nonplussed. Or indeed if this non-emotional lion is not another non-emotional lion. For a lion looks pretty much like another lion to the untrained eye. The liberty with animation of, for example, giving Nala blue eyes to contrast with the other lionesses, or give Scar his fiendish green eyes and black mane, cannot be utilized in a photo-realistic version that aimed to look like an episode of David Attenborough (with song).

Coming back to portraying emotions, one way that the lack of facial cues may have been somewhat remedied is by charging the voice acting with over-exaggerated emotions. But curiously, if anything, the new cast’s diction is if anything flatter than the old. Scar, for example, voiced by Jeremy Irons in the old classic, was your typical suave, Machiavellian, almost vaudevellian English villain, with a deep voice that can be like a pot of honey with a dagger inside or so full of sinister smug that it threatens to drips out of your ears. The new Scar, voiced by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is much less dramatic, less obviously villainous and therefore, making it even less obvious that Scar is the baddie. Timon and Pumba, whose voice actors stood out from the rest, equally was underserved by the lack of exaggerated facial movements that alone can make children laugh. Even Mufasa, who is voiced once again by James Earl Jones, the original voice actor, feels less emotionally charged. Perhaps the lack of facial cues detracts from the emotions perceived in the voice, but this might be why a 6 year old girl sitting in front of me spent a good deal of the time facing me rather than the screen.

The lions in the new movie look like the poster 90% of the time

Restrained by photo-realism, the production also did not have hyena’s playing the skeletons like xylophones, Rafiki the Baboon doing kung-fu, little Simba and Nala sliding down the necks of giraffes like slides or the head of a ghostly Mufasa appearing in the clouds – though some of these are alluded to in the same scenes in which they appeared in the classic version. This makes it less fun for the kids for whom this is the first exposure to the Lion King, and slightly disappointing to the adults who remember the extra vim and vigour of the original. The people running Disney seem to have forgotten that there is a certain elevated pitch that is the sole realm of animation, a license for high drama imbued with and refined by the fantastical, the nonsensical and the absurd. In fact, the foundations of their own company.

Fundamentally, the new Lion King feels like a cash grab, a cheap (but expensive) imitation of the original that’s less vivid, less exotic, less joyous and less emotional. If you wish to share the exuberances you felt watching the 1994 film, stick to the original. Accept no substitutions.