REVIEW: Barry Jenkins brings colour to stale Disney remakes with ‘Mufasa: The Lion King’

Latest effort to squeeze life from franchise feels formulaic despite visionary director

Mufasa: The Lion King
WHAT: Movie, 118 mins.
WHEN: Fri., Dec. 20
WHERE: In theatres
RATING: NNN (out of 5)

WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH: This prequel to the 2019 CGI remake of The Lion King delivers more visual interest and imagination than its predecessor.


IN A RECENT profile in Vulture, director Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, The Underground Railroad) described his experience directing the $250 million, all-CGI Lion King prequel with deep ambivalence. While the celebrated director appreciated working with the new technology, he disliked the strangely disembodied process (which involved no sets, props or live actors, just an empty soundstage) and the intense corporate oversight. While audiences have grown accustomed to the CGI-heavy, so-called live-action remakes of animated Disney classics that have clogged our theatres for the last decade, the question was what exactly a Jenkins version of this genre would look like. And it is slightly better than expected.

Mufasa: The Lion King tells the origin story of the king of Pride Rock, who was killed by his brother Scar in a scene that has surely traumatized countless young viewers of both the 2019 and 1994 Lion King movies. The tale is told by the prophetic mandrill Rafiki (John Kani) to Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter), Simba’s cub, with comic interjections by odd couple Timone (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen). In the story, an unassuming stray cub named Mufasa (Braelyn Rankins) discovers his royal destiny as he searches for a home with his brother, Taka (Theo Somolu). If you’ve seen any of the previous Lion Kings (or read Hamlet), you already know how the story ends. Still, there are enough exciting sequences, snappy dialogue and inoffensive songs to keep you engaged. And unlike its 2019 predecessor, Mufasa has some moments of visual style and even a fantastical sequence or two.

Although the 2019 Lion King (directed by Jon Favreau) was a massive financial hit and inspired a seemingly endless press rollout, including a tie-in visual album by Beyoncé, it felt like a creative misfire and, frankly, a slog to get through. The decision to render the story in a photorealistic style took away all the animated original’s goofy, fantastical and expressionistic touches. Instead of a new take on the story, we got a technically impressive but visually drab, sometimes shot-for-shot, remake that only underlined how much more fun the previous incarnation was to watch. (Of course, this comes from a millennial who grew up watching the 1994 version every week on VHS, so a grain of salt is required.) But Jenkins takes advantage of the possibilities of animation and gives us a much more colourful and engaging world that looks less like a nature documentary and more like a child’s imagination, with fantasy sequences that feature enormous clouds of butterflies or underwater scenes in fiery reds. Some shots even feel improvisatory, like an unexpected low-angle close-up of Pumba and shaking camera movements that could be the product of Jenkins’s desire to resist Disney perfection and keep the rough edges.

But despite these pleasant surprises and all of Jenkins’s genuine efforts, Mufasa still feels more like a cash grab than a fully realized film with too many meta-references to the franchise, half-baked themes on courage and belonging, and serviceable but decidedly uniconic songs by — of course — Lin-Manuel Miranda. (A possible standout is I Always Wanted a Brother, performed with ample flair by Somolu.) We will see if the prequel enjoys the same smash success as the first, or if audiences are starting to feel some fatigue over these expensive, inescapable but generally unmemorable remakes.