The cinematographer is Caleb Deschanel, who shot some of the greatest live-action animal adventures in movie history, including ' The Black Stallion,' and this production straightforwardly owns the notion of 'realness,' modeling its animals on actual creatures, defining character more through body type and ingenious details of movement than through facial expressions, which might've looked kinda creepy here, honestly. The latter are the movie's main selling point, so believable that one of my kids remarked afterward that sitting through the film was like watching a nature documentary on mute while the soundtrack to original 'The Lion King' played in the background.īut here's the thing: the movie is helmed by a Disney veteran, actor-director Jon Favreau, who's great at this kind of thing. And this might be his best-directed film, if you judge purely in terms of how the scenes and sequences have been framed, lit, and cut together. It serves up the same story with different actors, different arrangements of beloved songs and soundtrack cues, a couple of original tunes, a few fresh scenes and sequences, and, of course, photorealistic animals. The 1994 version was 'Hamlet' plus 'Bambi' on the African veldt: a childhood-shaping, Oscar-winning blockbuster, the second-highest grossing feature film of its calendar year, one of the last great hand-drawn Disney animated features (Pixar's original ' Toy Story' came out 18 months later), and a tear-producing machine. This remake was controversial long before it opened, mainly because it seemed to take the Walt Disney company's new branding strategy-remaking beloved animated films as CGI-dependent 'live action' spectaculars-to its most drastic conclusion.

It may be a long time before viewers can appreciate the 2019 remake of 'The Lion King' as a freestanding work, instead of judging it against the original.

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