Life on Earth, with songs

The pride of Disney Animation, The Lion King has been remade virtually frame for frame, but the CGI virtuosity dilutes some of the artistic sparkle of the hand-drawn original

Unlike the other films in Disney’s current onslaught of animation remakes (already this year we’ve had Dumbo and Aladdin, with Mulan still to come and The Little Mermaid just announced), the new version of

The Lion King has no “live action” stars in front of the camera. The 1994 original – the high point of the Disney Animation renaissance of the early 1990s and the studio’s last genuinely great traditionally handdrawn film) – was an all animal, African-set adventure and so is this new version, which features almost beat-for-beat the same plot, the same charmingly ear-wormy songs and even some of the same camera shots. What’s new – aside from most of the vocal talent and the odd song – is the photo-real CGI cast. Looking like they’ve pounced, flown and crawled out of a David Attenborough documentary, Simba and co have been digitally rendered with uncanny verisimilitude — something that helps offset the unavoidable anthropomorphism that

comes when making any fable with an animal cast required to emote and talk like humans.

Whether it’s worth all this effort is another question entirely. The seamlessness of the approach makes it easy to forget the technological wonders on display, but this quest for photographic realism also dilutes some of the artistic sparkle of Disney’s more traditionally animated films in a way that wasn’t evident in director Jon Favreau’s previous CGI re-do of Disney’s The Jungle Book. Combined with the minimal story revisions, this often makes the new film feel like an elaborate act of cinematic tracing, with one exception. When Simba’s villainous Uncle Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor) assumes control of Pride Rock and plunges the world into darkness – destroying in the process the delicate ecosystem kept in place by Simba’s father Mufasa’s “Circle of Life” philosophy (James Earl Jones once again voices Mufasa) — the film suddenly feels eerily redolent of the current precarious state of the world, especially when Scar lets a selfserving pack of hyenas run amok.

Mostly, though, this is a cheerful nostalgia simulator for parents who want to let their kids experience the film they remember in a format they’ll appreciate and understand. To this end, it’s an effective enough copy, though it does also underline the value of casting big name stars who can actually sing, as Donald Glover (who voices the grownup Simba) and Beyoncé (cast as his childhood friend Nala) most

assuredly can, over those who can’t, such as Seth Rogen, who voices beloved warthog Pumbaa and absolutely butchers Hakuna Matata.

In Tell it to the Bees, a shy young boy who’s bullied at school, disowned by his father and feels stigmatised by rumours surrounding his mother’s sexuality, discovers he has a superhuman ability to make bees swarm around and attack his enemies at will. OK, not really, but the ludicrous finale of this unintentionally campy film about a scandalous lesbian love affair in 1950s Scotland does feature a version of the just-described scene, which makes it more fun to imagine its narrator’s childhood reminiscences as a lame superhero origins story than taking this clunkily written, shakily acted and drearily directed melodrama as seriously as it wants us to. As a Scottish doctor returning to her hometown following her father’s death, Anna Paquin is fighting a losing battle against a twee accent, honking dialogue and laughably tremulous encounters with Holliday Grainger’s down-on-her-luck single mother. Ditto the usually excellent Grainger, who is sabotaged both by the film’s tepid depiction of her character’s wilder side and the decision to tell her story through the innocent eyes of her character’s rather drippy son. Adapting a 2009 novel by Fiona Shaw, sibling screenwriters Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth have zero feel for the film’s Scottish mill-town setting beyond

As a Scottish doctor, Anna Paquin is fighting a losing battle against a twee accent and honking dialogue