2019’s The Lion King Coughs up a Hairball
DIRECTED BY BARRY JENKINS/2024
A young lion cub living in the majestic African wilds of Tanzania is traumatically separated from his parents and subsequently raised elsewhere. Eventually, he must make his way back home to reluctantly claim his rightful position as King Of Everything.
This now-classic tale has previously been told at least twice by the Disney corporation, originally in 1994 in the Hamlet-inspired animated classic The Lion King. The hand-drawn expressive charm of that runaway hit was replaced with the studio’s photorealistic renderings of the characters and environs in the studio’s 2019 remake. As directed by visual effects savvy Jon Favreau (having made 2015’s eye-opening The Jungle Book), that film made a triumphant pounce at the box office, even while being widely derided as flawed, inferior, and thoroughly pointless. But of course, the roaring ticket sales is all it takes to trigger Disney into hacking up a second such furball.
Mufasa, the heretofore untold backstory of Simba’s late lamented father (here voiced by Aaron Pierre, a noticeable step down from predecessor James Earl Jones. A dedication to Jones at the film’s start is perhaps Mufasa’s only dignified moment), does all it can to land on all fours, but Pride Rock, it turns out, is much higher up than it seems. It also turns out that when it comes to such real-world-bound family-friendly nature-centric stories, characters getting separated and then meeting different characters while (eventually) working to make their way back home is the only high-stakes drama anyone can come up with. Consequently, redundancy reigns supreme when it comes to these Lion King movies. It’s right there in the title: we’re even told that the name “Mufasa” means “king”… so the title of this movie translates to “King: The Lion King.”
Redundancy via legacy being what it is here, all the scripty-script talk of “The Circle of Life” (going beyond the majestic ways of nature itself and tipping into some vagaries about destiny and purpose, bleh) makes one wonder if Disney will indeed let this franchise circle be unbroken and follow this with a traditional ink & paint animated version of the same story. At least that wouldn’t be muzzled by a creepy all-in commitment to photo-realistic rendering. When the lions smile in 1994’s The Lion King, it does not look like their faces are being distorted as though they have fallen victim to the Joker.
Also, in traditional animation the individual lions are much easier to tell apart. Mufasa does itself no favors by alternating between two time periods. In the present day, Rafiki (John Kani), flanked by next-level irritating Timon and Pumbaa (Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen, returning) tells Simba and Nala’s young daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Knowles) the story of her grandfather’s rise to lion king, allowing the narrative to toggle freely in and out of that tale. As we catch up with familiar characters (Simba and Nala, once again Donald Glover and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter) and meet many new ones (including Mufasa’s adopted parents Eshe and as Obasi voiced by Thandiwe Newton and Lennie James), the similar looking beasts become difficult to tell apart, particularly during the film’s several frenetic action sequences. Not since the 1981 Tippi Hedren family vehicle Roar has a film suffered to this degree from the problem of “too many lions”.
More effective as a VFX showcase reel for its animators than as a film into itself, Mufasa has the catty distinction of being director Barry Jenkins’ first movie to be crummy. (Following such rightly celebrated work as Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk). It’s good to see the filmmaker take a chance and venture this far from his established niche, but unfortunately, like Mufasa and Simba before him (depending on how you look at it), Jenkins can’t help but get lost thanks to the massively barreling forces immediately around him. (In this case, it’s being at the epicenter of an enormous studio tentpole project, working under the corporate and societal magnifying glass and also suddenly surrounded by more collaborators- many being animators!- than he’s ever dealt with before). You can’t blame a guy for trying, but hopefully Jenkins finds his way back to his own sweet spot sooner than later.
The only real bright spot in the long and numbing Mufasa is the work of songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton, Moana, Encanto). Once again shouldering the brunt of contemporary Disney’s overly complicated scenarios, Miranda had his work cut out for him this time. Miranda, though, is the rare talent who makes infusing catchy original tunes with the worldbuilding contrivances he’s handed look all too easy. While these new songs can’t measure up to the classic 1994 songs of Tim Rice and Elton John, some may have a future longer than that of Mufasa himself.
Like Wicked and Transformers One and the Star Wars prequels, Mufasa tells the tale of how the two leads, Scar (here known as Taka, voiced by Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Mufasa went from being inseparably close to bitter enemies. When Taka is eventually seduced by the white side of the Force (meaning, a conniving blot of white lions with an evil leader voiced by Mads Mikkelsen), he famously goes on in The Lion King to betray and murder his adoptive brother. (That move with the claws on his enemy’s paws? Get used to seeing that played out over and over). Along the way, the parade of new characters become too many to keep track of. If there’s a Lion King Wiki, it’s going to need an elephantine number of updates.
For whatever it’s worth, my ten-year-old daughter ended up enjoying Mufasa more than she expected to. But for the herds and herds of older moviegoers who’ve grown up or grown older with the original classic film, Mufasa is an exhausting trip to that outlying I.P. graveyard that should’ve remained off limits.