A new version of the Uncanny Valley

Rating: 7/10 (19 July 2019)

When I was a kid, Sunday night was "appointment television." NBC would broadcast the appetizer: "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom", immediately followed by the main course: "Walt Disney's World of Color".
"World of Color" was my introduction to all the great Disney cartoon characters. But most weeks the show would feature a great nature movie; an animal or an environment would be gently anthropomorphized into a story that I found very relatable, informative, and quite often emotionally moving. I still recall my favorite of these, a 1965 episode titled "Minado the Wolverine". These nature-films always used voice-over narration to tell their story; talking animals were for cartoon-use only.
Which brings me to Disney's new version of "The Lion King".
I really wanted to like this new "Lion King". I wanted to REALLY like this new "Lion King". And I think its execution is flawless. The cinematography is breathtaking, the rendering of the CGI animals is miraculous. The story is familiar, and deservedly loved. In the movie's action sequences, these all come together to make those moments riveting, perhaps as good as anything Disney has produced.
But in scenes when the dialogue becomes crucial, when the words are meant to evoke most strongly..."The Lion King" falters. I think the problem is that watching photo-realistic CGI animals talk, is too incredible to allow for suspension-of-disbelief. The reason the old "World of Color" films were so effective is that they relied on narration to reveal the thoughts of "nature." And the reason suspension-of-disbelief allows viewers to buy into animals-as-avatars for humans in animated films, is that the visual cues (animation) are copacetic with the conceit of talking animals.
And there's the rub for the new "The Lion King".
"The Lion King" is a fine movie, and definitely worth seeing in a theater. The scenery is lush, those animals are...dangerously beautiful (the state of the art in CGI is so exactly real, that I am uncomfortable thinking about what could be done with such technology should someone choose to use it maliciously), and the music and story transfer intact from the 1994 version of the movie.
But because I could never get comfortable with seeing "real" animals speaking human words and thoughts, the emotional power of the original gets lost in translation.