We’ve been watching too many of these Disney live-action remakes recently. The reason for this latest one is The Lion King was one of my wife’s childhood favorites and she vacillated for a long time over whether or not to catch it in the cinemas. In the end she said yes but by now we’re at the tail end of the showings and it has been relegated to one of the less well equipped halls with markedly poorer sound quality.

This is a highly faithful remake that is almost shot for shot identical for some scenes. Simba is the cub of King Mufasa and Queen Sarabi who rule the Pride Lands. Mufasa explains how they are stewards of the land and only take what they need, being mindful of how all living things are connected. Mufasa’s brother Scar is naturally resentful and after Simba and his friend and future wife Nala have a misadventure in the forbidden elephants’ graveyard, conspire with the hyenas there. Scar lures Simba into a gorge while the hyenas start a stampede of wildebeest. When Mufasa comes to rescue Simba, Scar takes advantage of the confusion to kill him and shames Simba into believing that he is responsible. He goes into exile and is makes friends with the warthog and meerkat pair Pumbaa and Timon who teach him to forget the past and live a carefree life.

What stands out the most about this version is of course the near photorealistic CGI. Without a doubt, the technical achievements here are stupefying and I kept asking myself how they managed to get all that fur right, or all that water and strands of grass, and all of the realistically animated animals. There’s no off the shelf technology that can do all that. This is breaking new ground in all sorts of directions and makes you wonder if this is going to make real documentaries which expend a lot of effort to get shots obsolete. Still, I note that it’s not completely realistic mainly because you can see that every scene is perfect and nothing is out of place. In the real world, there’s always the odd bit of debris, a random twig, bent and broken strands of grass, odd parasites growing on trees etc. The shots in this film have plenty of detail but you can tell that they hand-place the important eye-catching elements and then procedurally generate the rest.

Of course this is still essentially the same film apart from the visuals, with the same story, basically the same music, the same characters and even the same jokes. Yet though the visuals are incredibly immersive and realistic, one might argue that they are a poorer fit for the story than the original hand drawn animation. The animals now lack any facial animation and are less visually distinct one from another. As my wife notes, the animators do a great job of recreating realistic animal movements and behaviors, but this is still a story about anthropomorphic animals and the range of animal behaviors aren’t broad enough to encompass the human-like emotions of the characters. The push towards realism also makes violent scenes very awkward. They obviously don’t want to show any blood or visible wounds yet it visually incongruous how such realistic looking animals can fight and die without blood. It’s easier to wave that away when they all look like cartoons. At the other end of the spectrum, some characters that used to be funny aren’t any longer because the old humor relied on human-like body language.

Against all odds, I actually rather enjoyed this film, mainly because the source material is so strong and the visuals are suitably impressive. It’s still regressive and uncomfortable how Nala and the other lionesses have to rely on Simba to save them but it’s not as bad as Cinderella. There’s no way this can be judged as superior or even equal to the original however due to the lack of charm and emotion. Even so it did very well commercially I suppose that’s all that matters to Disney.