PAW-THETIC
‘Lion’ tech is great, but film has no soul
I don’t know how they did it. But Disney’s pristine, photorealistic rendering of the animated smash “The Lion King” trades one style of animation for another, marking a simultaneous advance and retreat for modern filmmaking.
It’s a step forward technologically and three steps back every other way. It represents a new high and a new low in Disney’s ongoing recycling program.
It’s persuasive, meticulous work within its chosen visual landscape, as far as it goes.
And for me it goes nowhere.
The new “Lion King” has every reason to exist in fiscal terms. It has no reason to exist as a movie we might take with us into our futures.
As Everett Sloane put it in “Citizen Kane”: “It’s no trick to make an awful lot of money, if all you want is to make a lot of money.”
Director Jon Favreau, who knows a thing or two, managed a pretty good result when he tried something similarly photorealistic with “The Jungle Book” three years ago. No such luck here. “The Jungle Book” featured one human actor surrounded by a passel of photorealistic digital critters. The new “Lion King,” like the old one, is all critters. Somehow that changes everything, and the “Lion King” remake offers twice the trauma and none of the zip of its 1994 source material.
The new movie’s about a half-hour longer than the animated version. Length doesn’t necessarily mean padding, as anyone who fell for Julie Taymor’s majestic stage version of “The Lion King” has discovered firsthand. The first few minutes of that theatrical titan? Holy cats. Unforgettable.
Giraffes, created by humans on stilts, strolling down the aisles. A rotating “gazelle wheel,” poetry in motion. An actress manipulating a wondrous rod-puppet cheetah creation, moving so that a feline licking its paw becomes a moment vividly recalled decades later. It was the stuff of dreams, and the highest sort of commercial art.
Opening on Broadway in 1997, Taymor’s vision remains there still, and has toured all over the world. (Taymor served as an executive producer on Favreau’s picture.) The stage incarnation of “The Lion King” shines as a working model for how a titanic entertainment corporation, looking to capitalize on its revenue streams, can elevate a property by respecting the material up to a point. And then letting the collaborators go their own way.
Compare those opening minutes to the opening of the new film version. Quite naturally the new film keeps both eyes on the ’94 movie. Mufasa (voiced by James Earl Jones, as he did 25 years ago) and Sarabi (voiced by Alfre Woodard) bring a prince cub into the world and introduce him to a life of royal privilege and responsibilities, to the tune of “Circle of Life” by Elton John and Tim Rice.
Cinematographer Caleb Deschanel pays close attention to the light, while the animation armies take care of the wind in the grass, and the grateful fealty in the eyes of each Pride Land species gathered for the occasion.
The opening does the job. It looks real-ish. And it’s crushingly unimaginative.
Financially this cat’s in the bag. Cinematically, though, the bag’s in the river.