Almost Greatness

Rating: 8/10 (20 December 2019)

This review is made assuming the original has been seen
This movie is almost a copy of the beloved 1994 'The Lion King' animation as wanted/expected.
The visuals are outstanding from the smallest details of a grain of dirt, to the wide open shots of Pride Rock.
The new actors were all great to hear and played there characters sometimes very similarly to the original, and other times very differently in their own unique way which was great.
I only had two problems with this movie

making a 'realistic' version of The Lion King, means taking away key features such as huge facial expressions to falling eye brows, which would normally show a characters feelings/emotions, yet as it needed to be as real as possible they had to remove these features which at time made it harder to understand how a character feels.
Also as a result to this having to seem realistic, some smaller things such as scenes from the original where harder to re-create e.g. Scars 'Be Prepared' song was shortened quite noticeably because they couldn't have Scar jumping about doing such unusual things for a lion to do. Another example of something having to change is when the hyenas are chasing Simba away, Kamari (hyena named Banzai in the original) instead of being pushed into the thorny bushes by Shanzi and Ed (other main hyenas) stops with the other two at the top, realising how dangerous it would be to go down there. This is just another way of being realistic which is fair.

These 'Problems' did in no way make this a bad movie and I recommend you watching it... unless you have not seen the original