The Lion King

The animators have done an excellent job in terms of authentic portrayals of living creatures and nature, ensuring that the animation is absolutely breath-taking, and many shots look as if they came from natural history documentaries. The problem is that The Lion King is not a documentary from the African savannah, but rather a musical from Disney, in which the animals talk and sing, and this truly does not work well together with photo-realistic animation. In order to achieve the greatest possible credibility, the animal heroes were deprived of all "human" facial expressions, and therefore the only emotions in their dialogues are the voices of their voice actors, which leave something to be desired. The story (basically Hamlet) is no different from the animated version (except that it’s half an hour longer) and it's still understandably great, but it just doesn't have much to surprise you with if you've seen the original The Lion King. The new The Lion King is a technologically perfect, but otherwise somewhat soulless copy of its much better predecessor. (03/10/2020)

A verbatim remake that, while visually stunning, is an identical copy of the famous original without any additional ideas, improvements or moments of surprise (except for the dung beetle). Favreau thus remains just a hitmaker who can deliver a film that will hit the hundred-million mark at the box office, but the soul of the original is nowhere to be seen. Commercially, it’s fine, perhaps, but otherwise it’s a pointless update of something that was already almost perfect. (21/07/2019)

The essence of sterility. Beautiful yet pointless. I wonder what Favreau's role as director was. It couldn't have been more than sending out two mass emails: one to the actors "put on The Lion King and say the same thing", and the other to the thousands of hopefuls behind the rendering computers "put on The Lion King, forget the emotions in the faces and otherwise do the same thing using CGI and share the result with me in a few years". There is not a single ounce of invention, no interpretation, let alone an original idea. On the other hand, the glitz is so intoxicating and the original material and music so catchy that if you have to take your kids to see it, at least it won’t a complete waste of time. (02/08/2019)

Jon Favreau got probably excited about new animation technology because after beautiful The Jungle Book he filmed  no less amazing The Lion King. And even though the story is well known and you heard the music a hundred times, it is still brilliant and I was captivated by this remake. And it is precisely this technology that makes me feel as if real living creatures were wandering through that bush. I was even horrified a little by the thought I had while watching this movie that the kids in the future might watch this kind of movies and think what a wonderful world we used to have... (24/12/2019)

If anyone is going to remake Disney classics, it should be Jon Favreau! The Jungle Book may have had more swing and adventure, but The Lion King is also breathtaking in its visuals, music, emotion and nostalgia. Tears on the edge of my eyes more or less the whole film. The scene with the hyenas is wonderfully creepy and the lion fight a clear highlight. The fairy tale of my childhood got a solid tribute. 85%. (27/07/2019)