Disney, it seems, is at least open to feedback. While the 2019 version of The Lion King may have been a hit, critics and audiences alike expressed an aversion to the uncanny inexpressiveness of its photorealistic, computer-animated felidae. And so, in its prequel, the lions have all had melted plastic grins slapped across their mouths. Some may prefer this. Personally, it frightened me on a primordial level, as if one of my old rainbow-splattered Lisa Frank pocket portfolios from the Nineties had gained sentience.
The sell here is both the promise of jacked-up anthropomorphism, and the talents of Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins, director of the miraculous Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). The news that he’d direct Mufasa: The Lion King sparked a minor controversy. Could he really turn what, on paper, seemed like arbitrary franchise mining into something extraordinary?
