Can 'Mufasa' break Disney's mediocre streak?

As the trailer for Mufasa, the inevitable prequel to The Lion King, continues to be shoved down our throats, I cannot help but think back to July 2019, when I informed my husband that the new Lion King would be compulsory viewing for our family.

The husband’s eyebrows made their usual dismayed trek heavenward. “I don’t understand,” he said. “You’ve already forced us to watch the new Aladdin and gave it three out of ten. Which you said was a very generous rating. What makes you think this time will be any different?”

My dear husband, you see, did not have a Disney-oriented childhood. He doesn’t know the songs from a bar of soap. He has not spent decades committing hours of dialogue to memory. He is in no way qualified to comprehend the inescapable pull of nostalgia.

Creative overlords at Disney suffer no such deficiency. For the past few years, Disney has relied almost exclusively on the jackpot power of memory yanking otherwise intelligent adults into the cinema to ingest a shot-by-shot remake. By retconning beloved villains, stripping away colour and producing bog-standard music, the company has raked in billions by churning out second-rate nostalgia-fuelled prequels, sequels and remakes. As betrayed millennials around the world are well aware, once it was parents who accompanied their children to a cinema at the release of a Disney film; now, it is children who accompany parents.

Doomed from the get-go

The Lion King (2019) got off to a bad start.

“I am giving this minus three,” I informed my baffled husband, who reminded me that it had been four seconds into the movie, meaning it hadn’t had time to dip down to minus three.

“That sunrise is off-centre,” I explained. “This is a disaster.”

The disastrous sunrise hit such rock bottom that there should have been nowhere for the film to go but up. And yet, this widely touted remake of the century found a way to corkscrew ever downwards into forbidding depths of mediocrity. Where every scene in the original Lion King marched the story along, a bewildering amount of screentime in the remake was devoted to a dung beetle doing its thing. As was widely mocked online, the lions wore just one bemused expression. Night-time scenes were devoid of colour. With a much older James Earl Jones back as Mufasa, there was no escaping that his voice had aged in the intervening 25 years. Even more Scandalously, Scar, the villain that should give a masterclass on villainry to his peers, sounded like a bored, tired old man. A tired old man who categorically did not issue a whole song and dance sequence to his crew of hyenas on how to ‘be prepared’, which leads us neatly onto the next big issue with Disney remakes.

Lacklustre music, dull visuals

Before the release of The Lion King (2019), we were reminded constantly that Beyoncé would be coming aboard as Nala, which was a pretty good indication of the crushing disappointment that was to follow. Beyoncé may reign supreme over the charts, but she does not radiate the aura theatrically trained singer, which was a hallmark of the artists who once lent their voices to Disney songs. Her breathy rendition of Can You Feel the Love Tonight (which seasoned unforgiving Redditers note, takes place, jarringly, in broad daylight) is typically Beyoncé, and pales in comparison to the original. It doesn’t even come close to matching the powerhouse vocals of, say, Idina Menzel in Frozen. As far as plots go, neither Frozen nor Frozen 2 have the most riveting of storylines, but what sets both films apart is music that reaches to your heart and doesn’t let go, coupled with a stellar singing cast that doesn’t need autotune.

It would be an oversight to direct all this acrimonious judgment to just The Lion King when there is such an abundance of other stunningly bad films. Aladdin, a remake released earlier the same year, also reeled in over a billion dollars in ticket sales, and broke at least a million hearts. Astonishingly, it had nothing to do with Will Smith reprising the late and great Robin William’s role, but the music.

Quite how anyone can destroy the original Aladdin score, full to the brim with fizzing-with-energy numbers, is a mystery, but the 2019 adaptation managed it in jaw-dropping fashion. Where the original A Whole New World dived straight into the song with a soaring string orchestra, the 2019 version opted for a slower-paced rendition powered by what sounds like suspiciously a synthetic percussion kit. Not only is the sound criminally bland, but the visuals are stupefyingly dark. You almost need to squint.

Squinting was not necessary in the original A Whole New World sequence, which positively pulses with colour. Hues of blue, deep purple, bright turquoise and blinding gold leap off the screen. To watch the new version immediately after it is akin to going to a Chinese restaurant and being served two-minute noodles. With over a billion dollars in ticket sales, it would be natural – but, as it transpires, foolish – to assume that a Disney remake would at least have visuals that match the original. But in their power-hungry nostalgia cash grab, Disney powers that be forget – or at the very least, ignore – the fact that in animation, there is magic. As every purist knows, when you need to incorporate a blue shape-shifting genie, a flying carPet, a semi-vocal monkey, and an opinionated parrot – and indeed, a murderous lion and a devastated lion cub who finds his father’s body – there is only so far CGI can take you.

Of course, this is the analysis of a cynical millennial who will fail to learn from past mistakes and still hope for great things from Mufasa. My children, who must have skipped the taste gene, will avidly watch all of the remakes I have mentioned from start to finish, and claim that they are “wonderful”. I, on the other hand, will continue to judge them to the death – and find them wanting.

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