'The Lion King' Provides Astounding Visuals, But Is a Soulless Carbon Copy of Its Superior Source Material

When animated Disney movies make money, those movies become live-action remakes. And then the remakes make money as well. And so, we are all connected in the great circle of financial gain.

Here We Go!

The Lion King is a musical comedy-drama written by Jeff Nathanson and directed by Jon Favreau. This movie is another manufactured product on Disney's never-ending assembly line of live-action remakes of animated classics.

And I'm not gonna spoil anything in this review just in case you haven't seen the original film. And if you HAVE seen the original film, then good! That means you basically know EVERYTHING that happens in THIS movie.

I'm not sugarcoating anything; I'm gonna tell you straight-out that this movie is a carbon copy of the original. Everything about this movie is ripped straight out of the animated 1994 film.

This film changed virtually nothing from the original. Though Favreau said the film isn't a shot-for-shot remake, a good 90 percent of it is. There are entire scenes and lines copied word-for-word from the original film. This movie fails to have anything distinct or unique about it.

Jeff Nathanson, the "screenwriter" of this film, had the easiest job in the world; all he had to do was find the script for the original Lion King, hit command C, and then command V. Then, he added a scene or two. That seemed like his entire job.

This movie simply had no personality of its own. Now, I'm gonna talk about some positive aspects first.

The Good

Now, let me just say that this movie's animation is incredibly realistic. Even though it's a "live-action remake," it is animated, and what Disney has been able to accomplish with their animation is, by leaps and bounds, some of the best we've seen in the history of cinema.

The lions and all the animals in this movie are photorealistic. I have no idea how much of this movie was animated and how much was live-action, and I don't know if the settings were real or animated like the lions, but my point is, the animation is objectively amazing.

All of the voice performances are good as well. The songs are great, mainly because they were taken from the original, and they were performed beautifully by this talented cast of singers.

I mean, Beyoncé is about as fantastic as you'd expect her to be in this role, but I kind of wish they hadn't used as much autotune for the songs as they did.

The stand-out stars in this movie are Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen as Timon and Pumbaa. They are both really funny in their roles, and they have a lot of comedic chemistry with each other. These two steal the show, and might even be funnier than they were in the original.

And I also loved John Oliver as Zazu, and they also did a good job of making the hyenas scarier while also retaining some of their comedy, with Keegan Michael-Key doing a really good job in this role.

The Bad

Now, this movie's story is exactly the same as the original. The original had a great story, so this movie also had a great story, but the original film was able to tell their story a lot better.

Because lions are not actually very expressive creatures—and when they had traditional 2D animation, they were able to get away with having lions show joy and devastation. But when they're trying to make it look realistic, the animals just don't have the amount of emotion and energy that they had in the original.

I feel like, much like Aladdin, this is a story with a lot of scenes that work much better in animation. For example, there's a scene in the original that always stood out as one of the funniest scenes in the film, and it's the "dress in drag and do the hula" scene.

This film makes the wise decision of leaving this out of the live-action film, because it's too cartoonish for live-action, but what we got instead was a scene that was funny, but nowhere near as funny as this scene.

And they also replaced the "Mister Pig" scene with a different scene that was also not as funny as the scene in the original. Here's why the live-action remakes don't work; when these stories and scenes work so much better in animation, if you go the live-action route, the only way you can go is down.

Here's another disappointment with this movie: Rafiki. They gave him the Iago treatment by completely removing the humor from his character, and making him a very plain, by-the-books wise character.

Now, even though I WANTED to see changes made to the original in this movie, I didn't want the changes to involve taking good aspects of the original and making them worse.

When you have a movie as perfect as The Lion King, you should take some scenes and improve them, not make them worse.

One thing that I wished had been explained was a scene where Scar could have done something, but he makes the hyenas do it for him, and had he done it himself (which he easily could have), the movie would have been about an hour shorter. This is a plot hole from the original that could have been explained, but never was.

In terms of being different from the original, they only added a few scenes near the middle, but these scenes don't add to the story. The story is the same, beat for beat.

This is yet another film that Disney has made for the sole purpose of cashing in on our nostalgia. What could have been a new and inventive spin on the original Lion King is instead a mildly entertaining inferior rehash of what we've already seen.

I'm not gonna lie; you will be entertained by this movie, and your kids will be entertained by this movie. But if you want to show your kids a MUCH better movie, show them the original Lion King.

That movie has some real emotions, and it has much more charm and heart than this manufactured, give-us-your-money product has.

I'm gonna give 'The Lion King' a 7/10 (B-).