Review of THE LION KING 2019

My daughter and I saw the new Lion King movie on July 19, 2019. The video below was my initial reaction,

To answer the question of whether the different animals on the different trophic levels represented classes of people, I made a second video.

A remark I once overheard was: "It's funny how all the animals bow down to the new baby lion, when lions kill other animals." I answered that lions, as apex predators, also make sure that the lesser animals that they hunt remain in prime condition. So the lion really does perform an important service to the animals he preys on. The benefit of this service is reaped collectively, rather than individually.

Nevertheless, The Lion King was never meant to be realistic. It is a musical with a story that has more to do with human beings than lions. The ethical dilemmas The Lion King portrays make sense to modern humans. The sensibilities it plays to are specifically American. Is it terrible to kill the baby son of the man you just slew in battle? Ask Achilles' son, Pyrrhus. You do know that he married Hector's widow and threw her son off a cliff, right? There's a reason you're not going to get a Disney movie that gives us a musical number based on that  moment. It's contrary to current American values. People today still praise Andrew Jackson for adopting the son of native Americans he slaughtered. The survivors said to him: "You killed his entire family. Why not kill him, too?" And while that reasoning makes sense to a lion or an ancient Greek warrior, it is not PG13.

It's not that real animals have no feelings. They do. It's not that real animals can't give us moving performances. They can. But the CGI version of The Lion King is trying so hard not to anthropomorphize that the charaterization of Mufasa and Simba as Americans and of Scar as a hoity toity British flavored intellectual just fails. It's a clash between the visuals and the soundtrack.

The Tim Rice lyrics, which are so clever, get very short shrift in this new version. So attend the Broadway Show or watch the old movie, if you want to experience the musical drama. And if you do eventually get a copy of the 2019 version, I would watch that with the sound muted. Because it does look good. But that's about it.

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