Shockingly realistic visual effects take away from emotional expressivity

Rating: 7/10 (25 July 2019)

For only rating this movie as a 7/10, I sure feel like I have a lot to say about it. The vision of the film was clearly to make the most realistic version of the classic tale as possible, and it succeeded spectacularly in that way. The wildlife and natural scenery were bar none in the world of CGI grounded in realism. This also happens to be its greatest downfall, however. By creating ultra-realistic lions, they sacrifice a huge part of what made the original lion king so special: emotional expressivity in the faces of the animals. So now we have reached an interesting point in our movie-tech, where we can create animation that looks worse but portrays human emotion well, or we can make things hyper-realistic. I look forward to the day we can have both. The voice acting cast was phenomenal. Specifically, John Oliver, Donald Glover, and Seth Rogan came out to play. Beyonce and Glover were interesting to hear sing together, with Glover holding down the lower, constant melodies, and Beyonce controlling the song. There were times that it felt Beyonce was going a bit too far and the character no longer felt like Nala, but rather, Beyonce.