Check out this updating list of musicals, plays, and operas that are now streaming! But it’s a delight-free philosophy, too.During these unprecedented times, the theater community has come together to provide viewers from around the world the opportunity to stream musicals and plays for free. It is, indeed, a problem-free philosophy. But even in those moments, don’t expect to be thrilled-only soothed. Favreau hits that ceiling often enough, sure.
Pointless, in this context, does not mean terrible, or for that matter even bad. If it’s pure revulsion and schadenfreude you want, stick with the Cats trailer. This is indeed the Lion King you remember, redone in a discomfiting but fundamentally inoffensive nature-documentary style you can tolerate. I am not going to sit here and tell you that I don’t enjoy watching theoretically live-action lions beat the stuffing out of one other. But Disney has no real explanation for trying to improve on the cartoon in the first place, besides the obvious one. I have no real explanation for this preference. (The crowd at my theater thought that part was very funny.) But watching Rafiki kick hyena ass was much more satisfying when Rafiki was a cartoon. It is indeed amusing that Rafiki the wise mandrill (John Kani) now discovers that Simba is still alive because of a piece of fur that now first passes through, uh, the digestive system of a giraffe. John Oliver is very much in his element as the frazzled red-billed hornbill Zazu, though when he blurts out something like, “The Pride Lands are in imminent danger!” you might reflexively assume he’s talking about the Supreme Court or something.
The comic relief is, indeed, the only real relief here. (It appears he mostly wanted to have Disney Lion Sex with his brother’s wife, who declines.) The villainous hyenas, as aforementioned, get a lot more screen time to seethe and slink about and whatnot, but they’re not allowed to be funny anymore, and thus I must report that Keegan-Michael Key, Eric André, and Florence Kasumba are no Whoopi Goldberg, Cheech Marin, and Jim Cummings. In terms of scene additions, you get Beyoncé-as-Nala delivering empty new bromides (“We have to do something! We have to fight!”) and Scar at least attempting to explain why he bothered killing his brother and taking his throne in the first place if he didn’t have much of a plan for actually ruling afterward besides lying around and glowering some more.
The songs are all just slightly worse-thanks to Glover and Beyoncé, “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” now has, like, 300 percent more melisma, to no particular effect-except for Scar’s here’s-my-evil plan jam “Be Prepared,” which now sounds like bargain-basement Leonard Cohen and is much, much worse.
This inspired in me not so much happiness as passive contentment, not so much wonder as mere recognition. In the theater, I found myself yearning for the shots to be exact, and often they more or less were: When a mourning Simba runs away and passes out in a pitless desert, you get the shadows of the vultures crossing over him, and then the vultures themselves framed by the pitiless sun. (That’s not repeated here, but the shot of Scar-now voiced by Chiwetel Ejiofor-looming over a doomed Mufasa-voiced, as in the original, by the ever-mighty James Earl Jones-is a bit more chilling.) The fact that the first words spoken in the original are Scar’s lament, “Life’s not fair, is it?” (Now changed to “Life’s not fair, is it, my little friend?” which like almost everything here is not worse, or better, so much as it’s just more.)Įverything You Need to Know About ‘The Lion King’ All of the Little Things That Made the Original ‘The Lion King’ So Great How the Original ‘Lion King’ Came to Life Seven Pressing Questions About the New ‘Lion King’ (Favreau emulates plenty of these, and yet his Pride Rock looks neither as majestic during the Good Times nor as elegantly dessicated during the Bad Times.) The Jaws-style zoom onto Simba’s shocked face as his evil uncle Scar triggers the wildebeest stampede that will claim the life of Scar’s brother and Simba’s father, Mufasa. The painterly landscapes, low-key but high-return, of trees and sunrises and storms and paw prints and whatnot. It turns out that the primary sources of joy and wonder in the 1994 Lion King, directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, are not so much the big things-the Elton John songs, the Elton John–sized emotions-as the little things.
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