Safe and uninspired retread, with amazing CGI

Rating: 6/10 (22 February 2020)

Safe. Pleasant. Uninspired. Pretty much every aspect of the film falls under those descriptions, especially the 3-D. The only surpassing element, for me, was the stunningly photo-real CGI, but even that brought its own baggage in terms of the characters' emoting. Animals' faces can't express human emotion; animators have always had to anthropomorphise them to an extent (it's what Disney was always great at); but here they don't. The lions' faces are blank. Their mouths move to speak human words, they sing to one another, but they're stuck in that too real/ unreal paradox, and it kept distracting me. There's just something a little "off" about the whole approach. I didn't have that problem at all with The Jungle Book, probably because the animals all had Mowgli to interact with. But here it kept me at a distance, emotionally. Didn't spoil the film for me, but it did make me question what I was looking at.
The 3-D was immersive at times - it added dynamism and tactility to some sequences. It definitely wasn't a waste of time. But after the impressive 3-D in Aladdin and Dumbo, I felt it was a step back into the timid, afraid-to-be-noticed approach we've seen so often from Disney. The extended sequence with the clump of lion hair reminded of the floating ticket scene in The Polar Express. But while Zemeckis worked the Z-axis overtime - in IMAX, it's still one of my favourite 3-D sequences - here they stay comfortably in the Goldilocks zone, and it's all a bit shrug-worthy.
Oddly enough, the 3-D conversion of the original cartoon was also a let-down.