Great visuals (with a huge downside), but misses the heart and charm of the original.

Rating: 6/10 (18 July 2019)

I don't know exactly what I expected and I also don't know how to really evaluate the film. First of all: the film actually looks excellent. The animals all look close to reality and it looks more like a film with real animals as actors than an animated film. That was it, however, with the positive changes worth mentioning, whereby even these monumental visuals have its downsides (see below).
The movie sticks very close to the original and offers only small differences, which negatively influence the overall picture. While the "real"-movie of the Jungle Book is, in my opinion, quite well done and skillfully changes the story of the cartoon to a more mature tone, we actually have exactly the same story with the Lion King, but which is told in the dialogues in a more rushed and emotionless way.
For example, the opening sequence is taken exactly frame by frame from the cartoon, which I actually found a successful introduction and fully felt the nostalgia. Already during the first dialogue between Scar and Mufasa it becomes clear what the movie will miss all the time: the emotional connection to the characters. The crux is that you can put more emotional facial expression in a drawn lion's face than in a "real" lion's face. Furthermore, the old voice actors were all better for me, which can also be due to the dialogues, which remain almost identical, but are delivered in a different way, or to the fact that they get some small, but sensitive cuts.
The film is therefore optically a hit, but the few changes it undergoes make it almost exclusively worse compared to the original. Only a few new scenes around Scar's reign as king and the design of Timon and Pumbaa and their jungle friends I find well done.
Otherwise, the film doesn't come close to the charm and magic of the original as expected. Of course, it's possible to watch an already known movie in the cinema, if you want. Apart from the changed production values it doesn't offer anything new.
I would argue that if the film would be released today without the existence of the original, it wouldn't go down in history as the best Disney film and most successful Disney film ever created. The differences in the dialogues may seem small, but they have serious effects on the character drawing and thus the emotional connection to the characters, that made Mufasa's death so traumatic for many viewers back in the day.