Nostalgia Not Enough

Rating: 4/10 (28 July 2019)

It's almost impossible to critique a remake of a movie purely on its own merit. Frankly, I'm my opinion, if you choose to remake a movie then the privilege of individual merit is void anyway. Having said that, I'll try to limit my bias. The opening scenes were stunning, both visually and audibly, and a deep sense of joy and wonder swept through my being as I awaited to see the reimagining of a childhood favourite movie. I had to restrain myself as I almost let out an audible sigh of wonder as little cub Simba was revealed. The animation was truly beautiful.
With the opening number finished, I waited, with excitement and unease, to see how the animators would tackle the challenge of making realistic looking animals engage in human communication. Unfortunately, this is where the magic of the cinematography and animation quickly gave way to, what I would describe as, cringeworthy and unnatural interactions between characters that don't have the body language or facial queues to portray any human emotion. Listening to the emotion in the character's voices come out of a lion, or hornbill, or hyena, or warthog, and not seeing their faces or bodies portray those same emotions felt awkward, and distracting. A lot of the dialogues, for example, listening to Scar and Mufasa's opening exchange, where they passionately engage in discourses of family loyalty and displeasure in each other's differing opinions, only to be portrayed through emotionless lions where their faces didn't express any of these ideas or emotions was really quite annoying and, simply put, bad. It felt like there was a real struggle to find the balance of realistically animating these characters and then trying to suspend our disbelief that they are capable of human ideas, language and interactions. I don't feel as though that balance was found. It seemed very jarring feeing like you're watching a BBC documentary, to then have these animals start talking to each other. The things about the movie I did enjoy were the beautiful songs and the score. Unfortunately, the majority of the songs and music was from the original movie, so I can't really give credit to the 2019 remake for that. Seth Rogan as Pumba was great, and everyone else was decent enough. Although, I'm not sure that you can blame the voice actors for much, considering they had the almost impossible task of making us believe these animals were talking to each other.
In summary, the cinematography and the animals looked amazing, and my only real concern was the awkward exchanges between the characters. But, considering the movie is a remake, I am rating as a remake, and in my very humble opinion it fell short of the original.