The "Live Action" (aka CGI) Lion King 2019

So I've seen the Lion King live action remake. I went to see if it's just as bad as I thought it had to be.

And it was actually worse. And I paid Disney to see the bad movie. And they're going to make more live action remakes because of that.

So really, who is the sucker?

When I first saw the "live action" (not really, but at this point let's roll with the meme) version announced, my question was: how are they going to portray any emotion with these pseudo-realistic 3D animal models? They would have to do something to convey characters' expressions, right?

Well, the answer is… no.

Imagine the original Lion King, but no one emotes in any way ever for the whole movie.

It's basically the Lion King 2019 in one sentence.

It's not that it's technologically impossible to make a CGI animal with an emotive face. The first Narnia movie is how old, well over a decade? And their lion was perfectly serviceable. No, the director just decided that the animals in the Jungle Book remake were just too cartoony, and made the lions in Lion King as realistic as possible!

You know, it's paramount that we're not distracted from lions play-acting Hamlet and making fart jokes with warthogs by any immersion-breaking unrealistic elements!

Someone stop this mad lad before he sucks emotions from all animated animals ever!

But it gets worse. The scenery, colours and composition of scenes got "realistic'd" too. My heart sank as soon as I saw the opening scene, which I remembered as a gorgeous, saturated red sunlight. Here it was just… some sunrise. Neat. I've seen more impressive ones myself, though. And there were some animals running and flying around, in a completely nondescript manner, as if someone inserted random frames from a nature documentary.

As one of my friends joked, they should have gone all the way and made the animals not talk either, and then have David Attenborough narrate the plot.

So that's the first scene. And it doesn't get better. It's like watching some villain, Lex Luthor let's say, cause he's got a lot of money like Disney, take a favourite thing from your childhood and, with surgical precision, replace its every molecule with a definitely inferior version of it. It's still the same thing, but the unmistakable air of inferiority permeates the very core of its being.

And then Lex Luthor gets even more money!

There's also one more funny effect of this "realistic" approach. Animals of the same species are impossible to tell apart.

Adult Simba looks the same as Mufasa. This kind of takes the steam out of that scene where Simba has to look in the pond and see Mufasa in his reflection. I mean… duh.

Nala looks the same as Sarabi. There's a scene near the end of the movie where Simba "hugs" both of them, and they look the dame same. It made me chuckle, because if you can't tell your girlfriend from your mother… boy, you're in trouble!

All hyenas look completely the same. This doesn't really matter, because the hyenas were gutted, and boy, I'm gonna complain about it at length later.

Scar is the only character that is kind of stylized, as they gave him the scar (obviously) and scrawny looks (but not his iconic coloration - lions with black manes exist in real life Disney, look it up!). But they catapulted him straight into uncanny valley, as by altering his body to look more thin, they somehow made him look like he has a giant head. It's a sorry state.

But, but. I wouldn't bother with this post if all I had to say were obvious things that you could have mostly guessed about the movie just based on its very nature. No, what I really wanted to mention are the changes.

So, going into this movie, I sorta had some expectations about what's going to change, based on reviews of other Disney remakes. They have a reputation of changing small details that an Internet critic might nitpick, generally pointless but harmless.

The changes in the Lion King remake are simply baffling. They improve nothing and actually create plot holes. And I understand that "make effort to make an already existing thing worse" is the core idea of this film, but it still seems like taking it too far!

Thus, I present to you the most pointless and confusing changes made in the film, in roughly chronological order. Let the fact that I can still recall them be the testament of how off they felt.

• Rafiki's "alchemy" was rejiggered. In the original he was using some sort of fruit juices to do his things. Now he's using powder made from roots and paste made from bugs. So clearly the bug symbolism has been extended? Or maybe it looked better in 3D? I dunno. And that's just the beginning of me asking "what, why?" every few scenes.
• So in the original there's a scene where Zazu makes a trivial morning report to Mufasa, then a gopher comes out of the ground, whispers something to Zazu, then he shouts out that hyenas are attacking. It's a basic gag. Well, in this version there's no gopher (too hard to animate somehow?) and Zazu just shouts about the hyena attack out of nowhere after his boring report. It makes the whole scene idiotic; like, if he knew about the attack already, why didn't he start the report with it.
• The attack report is altered so that Zazu says that Sarabi is fighting them. This creates a glaring plothole because Simba is sent home and then Sarabi is there like in the original. There's also no point to this. Like, if they wanted to make Sarabi some kind of hyena slayer, she doesn't fight ever again in the movie.
• Scar's motivation is slightly altered. In the original he wants power because he's bad and vain, I guess. Here he is also… jealous that Sarabi is Mufasa's mate? It adds nothing to the movie, isn't really ever mentioned again, and I'm at a loss why it was necessary. My one idea is that after hearing so much about "gay coding" of some classic Disney villains, they wanted to make Scar heterosexual explicitly. I know it's stupid, but at least it makes some kind of sense!
• Hyenas… well, that's probably the biggest and most thoroughly WTF changes in the movie. But like with others, the key points are that it makes no difference in the story while making everything ever so slightly worse.
  
  All three of our hyenas are different characters. Shenzi went from some random goof (it never seemed like she led anyone other then her two goons) to a serious as a heart attack leader of the entire hyena clan. The hyenas' stakes went from Scar promising them lots of food to Shenzi allying with Scar basically out of desperation to save her people from starvation.
  
  It's like I'm reading one of those grimdark fanfics I used to enjoy in my teens. What the hell is going on, Disney?!
  
  It makes the whole thing ever so slightly unsettling, because now when the hyena's are banished from the lion lands they're basically all sentenced to starve. That subtext was never in the original! And it makes the "circle of life" bullshit ever more hypocritical. And everyone is like, "well, if hyenas just can't help themselves and ruin the environment around them, then they just deserve to die!"
  
  Maybe Disney should have followed trough with the grimdark fanfic thinking and made the lions into self-serving tyrants ruling over the animal dystopia.
  
  Since Shenzi is serious now, she can't take part in any gags anymore! She mostly just stands still, staring menacingly and barks orders from time to time. So that's it for her!
  
  The two other hyenas aren't, apparently, Banzai and Ed, but we don't learn their names or really anything about them. They have like less than two minutes of screen time in total, and one gag to share between them. Which, combined, is probably for the best, since the gag was only moderately funny the first time.
• Okay, this doesn't really count as a change, but the stampede scene is just awful. Without the liberties allowed by hand-drawn animation, Mufasa getting trampled by the antelopes looks ridiculous, as there's plenty of space between the running animals. And Simba holding on to a branch and being shaken looks just flat and almost funny, as if someone was trying to dislodge a kitten stuck on a tree.
• Timon and Pumbaa… now live with an entire pack of outcast animals in their oasis. This doesn't change much, really, but is pretty harmless. Sure seems a little more realistic that they have a little society down there instead of two guys just hanging out in the middle of nowhere forever.
• Speaking of Timon and Pumbaa, "hakuna matata" gets a little more philosophical bend in this one. It's contrasted with the "circle of life (but without hyenas)" from the beginning of the movie, which represents taking responsibility for the world around oneself and one's position within it, while "hakuna matata" represents sort of Epicureic detachment from the world and attaining life outside of it's worries.
  
  Basically what I'm saying is that it was kind of cool to have a character in a Disney children's movie outright say "life is meaningless".
• There's a little scene added of Nala sneaking out of the Pride Rock under the hyenas' noses. Thanks, I guess? Is it supposed to set up her conflict with Shenzi? It doesn't really do that. And I'm not sure if I'm glad or disappointed that they didn't go with the Broadway version of this event where Scar tries to rape Nala. It would fit right with the fanfic hyenas.
• The scene where Sarabi said to Scar "you're forcing us to overhunt" and Scar is being a jerk was reworked into an overcomplicated and contradictory mess of lion politics. Scar gets Sarabi alone while eating and tells her he'll let her eat extra (or some such offer like that) if she starts showing him respect and become his queen, because without her respect no other lionesses respect Scar. She tells him to go stuff himself, to which he punishes her by making the lionesses feed after the hyenas.
  
  First, if no lionesses respect him, how is he king of anything? Why don't they just overthrow him? It can't be because of the hyenas, because if the hyenas could overpower the lion pride, they would've just done that instead of allying with Scar.
  
  Second, if the threat is that lionesses will starve if they don't sumbit, who the hell Scar is going to rule. If he weakens his own pack, then the hyenas will just turn on them and remove them all the same.
  
  Bullshit lion politics! And none of these plot holes were there in the original!
• "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" is shot in midday! With lyrics making reference to "this evening" and all. How the hell do you fuck up this badly? Also, no, I absolutely can't feel the love from those emotionless models, thanks. At least the future generations won't be depraved by 2D Nala's bedroom eyes.
• The scene where Simba meets Rafiki is chopped short for some reason. Perhaps the original was too hard to animate? It makes the whole scene flatter, but at this point I was beyond caring.
• The scene where Timon and Pumbaa distract hyenas was changed from Timon doing a hula dance to the two of them presenting themselves as food for predators, start singing "Be Our Guest" and bolt. This change I actually like. In 2019 reference humour is still all the rage, and it wasn't so when the original was released. Plus, the original scene was kinda random and weak.
• The fight scenes at the confrontation with Scar were extended. Because fight scenes are what people go to the fucking Lion King to see.
• I think they also extended Scar's conversation with Simba at the end, I remember liking it, but for the life of me I can't remember what exactly changed.

And the saddest thing is, for all the changes that added nothing or introduced even more plot holes, they falied to solve the one actual plot hole: who the hell Nala's father is?

Because, as many people had pointed out, the logical answer would raise some serious incest problems.

Not to mention they run into them again in the sequel, this time explicitly hitching Kiara with her cousin, and had to patch it with narration and plot holes.

Seriously, what is it with lions and incest?



ADDENDUM: After I've written all of this, I've watched Lindsey Ellis's video commenting on the current state of Disney



The video posits that some of the changes I mentioned that regarded female characters was to make them seem more "empowered". I suppose that is some kind of explanation, although it makes it seem like the script was run through an unsophisticated AI made to wokify the existing female characters. Mention Sarabi fighting: +5% woke! Increase Shenzi's leadership magnitude: +10% woke! Make Nala mouth off to Shenzi before fighting and have a short sequence of just them fighting: +30% woke! None of these changes are substantial or really change something about the characters, but they undeniably exist.

I honestly find it easier to thing that those changes would be made by some automaton with no concept of the characters or feminism, than that a human sat down and decided that yes, this is just what we need to improve the female characters and the messages of the movie!

But now I want "Shenzi is a Girlboss!" on a T-shirt.