The Lion King (2019)

There's a moment early in this film when the sun rises over the Pride Lands and "Circle of Life" swells on the soundtrack, and I felt absolutely nothing. Not a tingle. Not a lump in the throat. Nothing. That moment alone told me everything I needed to know about what Jon Favreau and Disney had made here: a technical marvel with no soul whatsoever.

Let's be clear about what this film actually is. It's not a remake. It's not a reimagining. It's a near-shot-for-shot digital replica of the 1994 animated film, rebuilt in hyper-realistic CGI so polished and so painstaking that it almost takes your breath away. Every blade of savannah grass, every ripple on a watering hole, every strand of a lion's mane is rendered with extraordinary detail. And it means absolutely nothing. Because technical achievement without emotional truth isn't filmmaking. It's a very expensive screensaver.

What made the original work, what made it feel like something, was the expressive language of hand-drawn animation. Those characters could smile, sneer, raise an eyebrow, widen their eyes in grief or wonder. Animation exaggerates. It has to. That exaggeration is precisely how it communicates feeling across a cinema screen to a seven-year-old in the back row. Strip that away in the name of photorealism and you've made a fundamental, catastrophic error. These animals look like animals. Real animals. And real animals, however beautiful, don't carry a story on their faces the way characters need to.

So how do you convey Simba's guilt, Scar's venom, or Timon and Pumbaa's infectious goofiness when none of them can actually smile or frown? You can't. And the film can't. The musical numbers expose this problem most brutally. "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" has no bounce, no visual imagination, no energy. "Hakuna Matata" feels like an obligation being discharged. And "Circle of Life," one of the most stirring openings in the history of popular cinema, lands with the force of a damp flannel. It's genuinely painful to sit through.

The voice cast do what they can. Donald Glover brings warmth. James Earl Jones returning as Mufasa is the one decision that makes unambiguous sense. Beyoncé is Beyoncé. But they're all fighting against visuals that give them nothing to work with and a script so close to the original that it highlights, constantly and cruelly, exactly what's been lost in translation. There's no spontaneity here. No joy. No risk. Every choice is safe, calculated, corporate.

Favreau showed with The Jungle Book that CGI-driven live-action remakes of animated Disney films can genuinely work. That film had momentum, atmosphere, a sense of danger. It understood that if you're going to rebuild something from the ground up, you have to find a reason to. A new angle, a different tone, a fresh interpretation of the material. This one makes no such effort. It exists because Disney owns the IP and CGI technology had advanced enough to make it possible. "Because we can" is not a reason to make art. It barely qualifies as a reason to do anything.

I don't want to call it a bad film in the conventional sense. It's not offensive. Nobody phoned it in. The craft on a purely technical level is staggering. But craft in service of nothing is just craft, and there's a kind of hollowness to watching all that effort amount to so little. The original Lion King was about life and legacy and feeling the weight of who you're meant to become. This version is just pixels, arranged with immense precision into the shape of something that used to matter.

Two stars.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-07-31

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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