Main cast: Donald Glover (Simba), Seth Rogen (Pumbaa), Chiwetel Ejiofor (Scar), Alfre Woodard (Sarabi), Billy Eichner (Timon), John Kani (Rafiki), John Oliver (Zazu), Beyoncé Knowles-Carter (Nala), Florence Kasumba (Shenzi), Keegan-Michael Key (Kamari), Eric Andre (Azizi), and James Earl Jones (Mufasa)
Director: Jon Favreau
The biggest problem with this version of The Lion King, aside from the fact that it is created solely as the laziest way to make more money for an evil corporation that denies the father of a dead child the opportunity to use an image of Spider-Man on the boy’s tombstone because LOL, is that it features realistically depicted animals. Imagine human voices coming from lions that look like, well, lions. The end effect is far creepier than I expected. Worse, while cartoon animals are anthropomorphic – which is to say, they can still be drawn with exaggerated facial features to resemble human being’s while still being animal-like in other ways – these animals can’t show facial expressions like humans do.
Therefore, I can only blink like a dazed goldfish at the big screen while a muted “NO!” squeaks out from the blank baby lion Simba’s mouth as his father Mufasa falls down the ravine like a dumpy old refrigerator someone has callously pushed over a cliff. Compare this to the same scene in the animated version, where Simba’s face is clearly showing his terror, while Mufasa slowly falls into darkness as the scene pulls away to show me that it is a view from Simba’s perspective – the cub has just seen his father died before his eyes, as a result of a trap set by his uncle Scar; a trap in which Simba stupidly played the bait. You can see the guilt sink into the terrified cub’s face as he realizes just what he has done.
In this movie, it’s just a blank-faced cub going “No!” in embarrassingly nonchalant way, looking at the camera as his daddy falls down the cliff, oops.
In the original animated version, it is quite creepy to see Nala to put on a clearly “I’m horny!” face as she rolls around with Simba. Still, the message is clear: girl wants the lion ding, so yas kween. Here, it’s just two lions tussling around like I’m watching a documentary on the National Geographic channel, and I wonder why my life has been reduced to this point: cringing as I’m trying to figure why I am sitting in the cinema watching what is basically an expensively made movie of soft toys being thrown at one another while Beyoncé Knowles-Carter goes woo-la woo-la woo-woo in a new song that is so bland that I can’t recall anything about it.
What, you need to know the story? It’s practically the same as that of the 1994 animated movie version: cub is unknowingly part of the reason behind daddy’s death at the hands of the evil uncle, runs away to go all hakuna matata with Timon and Pumbaa, whom are now heavily implied to be having trans-species homosexual intercourse because Disney wants every live action remake to be 300% gay and 500% woke these days, before he loses his virginity to Nala and decides, hey, I’m gonna kill my uncle and take back my daddy’s harem for myself. Of course he does, and then he eats all of his uncle’s cubs so that the lionesses all go into heat and he can lustily impregnate them all. The last bit isn’t shown in the movie, though, as it’s a prime example of toxic Republican white male behavior and hence is no longer allowed, but come on, it totally happened.
The whole thing is as clichéd as can be, but the animated movie was at least very well crafted. Here, this version of Scar is bland and unconvincing as a villain – especially when I compare it to Jeremy Irons’s Scar, which I of course can’t help doing – while everyone else is just… ugh. Come on, it’s a movie of animal soft toys with moving mouths so that human voices can be piped out in a creepy manner through those lips.
This is a freaking cringe of a soft toy disaster. Furries may play this movie as foreplay before their orgies in conventions to come, but I really, really regret saying yes when I was invited to watch this thing. Thank goodness I didn’t pay for my ticket, I guess?
