Overrated pap

Rating: 3/10 (27 December 2011)

A little balance, I hope, to offset the rants of some of the single-star-ers: after years of having "The Lion King" simmering in the background of my film-going conscience, we finally bought it for the kids for Christmas and watched it tonight for the first and, at least for me, last time.
The Simba/Kimba thing has been mentioned here enough, so I'm going to focus on this from a story-and-character point of view.
 half-hearted (read: rather pathetic) attempt at explaining away the "we eat animals but when we die we become grass so what goes around etc." concept (or restated, the prey animals know their place in the big picture and consent to being eaten  nice if you're the lion), but let's not get too deep into the mythologies this film supports (patriarchy-as-common-sense, benevolent dictators, ma-'n'-pa family model as the ideal, Africa as one big national park)
 poor character development. Simba is just shallow and his change of heart towards the end is cheesy.
 by comparison with films like "Toy Story" or even the "Ice Age" franchise, the writers simply seemed to lack imagination. Perhaps they cancelled each other out, considering that this was definitely not the brainchild of a single writer whatever, the result is pretty watery
 Scar is barely scary, nor is his scar ever explained. He comes off as being effete and lazy and conniving, which is fine, but like all the other characters here he's completely two-dimensional from start to finish. A mediocre villain at best.
 A lot of the Americanisms in the dialogue left me cold: this was clearly pitched at a Disney-loving US-English audience
 Mostly cheesy humor. Second time I've used cheesy here, must mean something. Lots of mediocre puns, a few good ones. And somehow, references in films like this to classic lines from far more adult and accomplished films like "In the Heat of the Night" and "Taxi Driver" (both get a nod from Pumbaa in his "Are you talking to *me*? -- THEY CALL ME MR. PIG!" sequence) come off as cheap and Disney-American in the worst sense. Some brightish moments when Fuzu is the unwilling object of a "pounce" lesson and the look on Nala's face after her dip in the pond, some decent character voice work from Rowan Atkinson and Jeremy Irons despite the lines they were given.
 Characters appear at opportune moments with no sense of them being there for any other reason than an easy out on the writers' part: Musafa rescuing Simba from the hyenas, e.g. or Simba rescuing Timon and Pumbaa from Nala.
 The orchestral music is overblown, the songs largely forgettable. Strange, considering the involvement of Tim Rice. I'll leave Elton out of this: apart from "Tommy" I was never a fan. Although Timon's anti-romance intro to "Can you feel the love tonight" is pretty good (just the intro, though).
 Just why the heck did the river run dry just because Scar took over the pride?
 For a "family film" this is pretty high on the violence scale, not least the slow motion and totally uninspired slugfest between Simba and Scar.
 Enormous plot holes and missing info: Did Simba really get that big and strong on bugs alone? Why did Scar have so much access to little Simba when Mustafa obviously mistrusted his brother? Where was Simba's mum all this time? Just how did Simba pull himself back onto that rock at the end when Scar had him dead to rights? Etcetera.
 Some egregious examples of explaining away plot points in the dialogue, especially how Nala just happens to stumble across Simba again.
 Cloying and sentimental far too much of the time.
Okay, that's my two cents for now. I could go on, but would it be worth the effort? The best I can hope for is to persuade a couple of potential viewers to make better use of their time than with soft-boiled tripe like this.