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You didn’t have a hard time believing in Mowgli partying it up with Baloo to the tunes of Bare Necessities because for all you knew, they could be communicating in any number of human or animal languages.
But as nearly every other review of The Lion King unanimously agrees, the movie looks like a National Geographic documentary with voice-overs for the featured animals. So completely are you submerged in this animal world, in the absence of human characters, that to watch the creatures crying, singing, and roaring in English feels absurd. You connect to the story only because you already know what to expect. And you feel particularly let down by this diluted version of Simba crying beside his dead father and the climactic “I killed Mufasa!” delivered by Scar.
It’s no mystery as to why Disney has settled on this remake spree. Compared to its recent flop releases John Carter (2012) and Tomorrowland (2015), Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2015) and Bill Condon’s Beauty and the Beast (2017) earned over a billion dollars. Both The Jungle Book and Aladdin have (so far) skirted the USD 960 million range, and The Lion King has already earned as much just over the past two weeks since its release. The Mulan trailer is fresh out of the oven, and The Little Mermaid is set to follow soon.
While Disney earns its big bucks, for its vast fanbase the remakes offer an adjusted lens through which to better understand some of their favourite childhood stories. The live action Beauty and the Beast tweaked the story just enough for each character to gain greater agency and nuance. We meet a stronger, more fleshed out and therefore more believable version of not only Belle and the Beast, but also Gaston, LeFou, Maurice...them all. Aladdin , to its discredit, took the fieriest of Disney princesses and diluted her into a heroine who cries, sings, and occasionally slips out a snarky remark here and there. But it also made Will Smith’s Genie a far-more human version than that of Robin Williams’ —giving him a love interest, skewing his musical taste more towards hip-hop and away from Williams’ jazzier numbers. As an audience, you’re therefore made to pay closer attention to Genie’s perpetual struggle to be more human, more himself, and less a cog in his masters’ tales. He’s more himself right from the beginning and not just at the end when Aladdin deigns to set him free. Meanwhile with the upcoming releases—the news of Halle Bailey signing on as Ariel has triggered important discussions on social media about how comfortable we are, how comfortable we should be, with imagining our favourite Disney characters as anything but white.
Unfortunately, in staying too faithful to the original, The Lion King remake offers few, if any, of these added insights. Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack is heart-wrenching—Beyonce’s new number Spirit in particular—as are the scenes of Mufasa and Simba frolicking at sunset, and a more grownup Simba with Timon and Pumba all but blanketed by a diamond-studded sky. You laugh, you sing, you jump when lion roars pierce through the scene. But you could just revisit the 1994 original for the same, if not a higher, amount of feels.
The writer can be reached at sarah.anjum.bari@gmail.com