This is going to be a tough one for me to explain my feelings on. First, let me share my perspective with the movie going into it. I understand that there’s some fatigue going around with the Disney live-action remakes currently, and I partially include myself in that. After all, The Lion King is the third live-action remake we’ve seen in 2019 alone, after Dumbo and Aladdin. However, despite that fatigue, I was actually really excited for The Lion King. For starters, it’s among my top 5 Disney movies ever, so I’m always down for more. But more than that, I saw a lot of potential with this. For me, the best Disney live-action remake so far has been The Jungle Book from 2016. This was that rare breed where I actually prefer the remake to the original. That movie had such incredible visuals, CGI, and animation, and so I figured this was what was going to happen again for The Lion King. Once again, I was ready to see the animals brought to life, and sit in awe at how incredible the story plays out with the realistic lions on-screen. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the effect that the movie had on me.

After an introduction, I usually like to summarize what the plot of a movie is, but I feel like that’s unnecessary for this. Almost everyone with a pulse has seen The Lion King, so for the vast majority of audience members seeing this remake, you’re going to be seeing it with the memories of the original animated movie attached to it. And going along with that, this remake barely deviates from the story of the original. There’s always a lot of discussion and debate over what remakes are supposed to do, and how similar or different they should be from their original counterparts, but in the end it was probably a good choice to keep the story similar here, since the visuals were kind of more the point here. But regardless, this is going to be the only real discussion on the plot here. If you liked the story of the original Lion King, you’ll like it here too.

Now, on to the discussion about the visuals. Okay, so…this is where it gets weird for me. Like I said, there have been a lot of people that are down on the Disney remakes right now, but I’ve actually been a big defender of The Lion King remake, because I was convinced it was going to be as magical as The Jungle Book. The big reason for this really was because of its visual style, which I thought looked amazing from the trailers. But then when I actually watched the movie, I was surprised to find that it was actually the visual style that ruined the entire movie for me.

This is hard to explain, because when the movie opens I felt that same excitement that I did from the trailers. I thought the characters and environments looked absolutely stunning, and I was excited to see how everything would look for the rest of the movie. In hindsight, I’m realizing that this is because The Lion King actually DOES look amazing from a purely picturesque standpoint. If you’re looking at an image of the movie, or even a short snippet without dialogue, you’re likely going to be impressed, because on its own the visuals actually are pretty stunning.

Things started to become more clear to me as I watched the movie though. Once the characters started talking, something just didn’t quite feel right. Don’t get me wrong, I think the voice acting is amazing, but it just felt weird. It just didn’t really feel like the voices I was hearing were coming out of the animals I was seeing on-screen. And look, I recognize that suspension of disbelief is required for this kind of thing, so I’m not saying that in the sense that it felt unrealistic for an animal to be talking. Obviously. What I more started to realize over the course of the movie was that there was a HUGE dissonance between the visuals and audio.

See, the movie is shot in a way where it almost looks like a nature documentary. Like I said, if you’re just looking at stills of the movie, the animals look super realistic. However, the voice acting just doesn’t reflect this. The voice acting is way more in line with the original animated version, where everything was much more cartoony and much less realistic. So, it felt really off-putting to hear a cartoonish voice coming from a realistic lion. It was almost like watching one of those YouTube videos where people take footage of animals and give them silly voice-overs. It just didn’t feel right.

The other problem this leads into is with how realism interferes with emotion. We were able to really feel a lot of the emotions in the animated version because of how exaggerated we could make the faces of the characters. Things like Simba and Nala’s romance, Scar’s hatred, or Mufasa’s death (like I said, you should know the story of The Lion King if you’re going into this, so I don’t feel bad about spoilers) are all really felt because we can clearly see it conveyed on the characters’ faces. This just isn’t the case with this remake, and it plays into that dissonance I just mentioned. The faces of the lions in particular barely emote, and so their faces end up looking really similar regardless of the emotion that’s in a scene. I felt traces of this from the very start, but I recognized it as a dealbreaker during Mufasa’s death. I heard the emotion coming from Simba’s voice over his father’s death, but that emotion was nowhere to be seen on Simba’s face. It’s really jarring, and I honestly don’t know how this wasn’t a huge problem for more people.

The weird thing is that the dissonance actually continues beyond this too. See, the really bizarre thing is that not every character looks as realistic as others. This happened in smaller ways early on with a character like Zazu looking a bit more animated than the lions, but the time I noticed this the most was when Timon and Pumba were introduced. Timon in particular really doesn’t look that realistic in the face. The weird thing is that I actually preferred this style though. I felt like their goofy antics were much more believable, and enjoyable as a by-product, because their voices actually matched up with their faces and animations. I honestly kind of wish that the realism in the movie was toned down slightly more overall, because I found myself enjoying the movie the most during these scenes.

The thing that baffles me about all of this is that I seem to be alone in my feelings on this. Sure, there’s a bit of a critic-audience divide with this movie, but not for the same reasons I’m saying. The critics seem to be focused more on how by-the-numbers the movie is, while still praising its visuals. Then you have the audience members that basically seem to be universally loving this. This is all strange to me, because before the movie came out I found myself being one of the only people defending the movie to a bunch of nay-sayers, and now the opposite thing has happened. Everyone has been so pleasantly surprised by this, while I ended up feeling very disappointed.

The tragedy of it all for me is that I feel like I otherwise would have loved the movie if not for its visual style. When the movie is fun I found myself actually really enjoying it, and so it was a nice way to re-experience one of my favorite animated movies. And there were actually a lot of sections where I still thought the movie looked beautiful, particularly in its climax. I would have really liked this movie if the animation didn’t take me out of it so much. The huge dissonance between realistic visuals and cartoonish voice acting was so jarring to me, and unfortunately it ended up ruining the entire movie for me. I wish it didn’t end up being such a dealbreaker for me, because I really wanted to like this movie. Unfortunately, it just didn’t turn out how I was hoping.

2.5/5