Starring Aaron Pierre, John Kani, Mads Mikkelsen, Donald Glover, Seth Rogan, Thandiwe Newton, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Keith David, Lennie James

Directed by Barry Jenkins

Disney, in cinemas now

When lion cub, Mufasa, is swept away from his parents by a terrible flood he is rescued by Taka, another cub, and the heir to a royal bloodline. The two lions grow up as brothers until circumstances test their relationship.

I blame Sir David Attenborough.

Whatever else one might say about Mufasa: The Lion King there can be no doubt that, in visual terms at least, it is a breathtaking affair. The African landscapes are awe-inspiring; the animals rendered like never before, each hair in the lions’ manes seeming to have a life of its own, the anatomically perfect muscles rippling under their skin; the 3D air given depth by the flutter of butterflies and the spectral shimmer of fireflies; water flows with liquid heft, snow compresses under animal feet with a beautifully deadened acoustic crunch, sunlight flares into the lens… Ahhhhhh! It’s so ‘real’…

…it’s downright odd that they keep bursting into song and not doing the things we see lions only half as realistic as this getting up to in a David Attenborough documentary. I’m talking about sex and killing. Yes, I know it’s a Disney movie, essentially for children, but both activities are actually integral to the plot and neither of which warrant more than a passing mention.

This is nature beige in tooth and claw.

And that’s the main problem with Mufasa – COLON! – The Lion King (just in case audiences might not be sure which franchise they were going to see). The more realistically the digital ‘live action’ is rendered, the less ‘real’ any of it feels. Half way through I was longing for it to look like a cartoon, so I could forget about how far away from reality it was for just a second.

But for anyone not bothered about such animated cognitive dissonances, does Mufasa stack up as a movie? Well… sort of. If you’ve ever been curious as to how Mufasa got to be the late, great James Earl Jones, and how Scar got to be Jeremy Irons then this is the film for you. However about halfway through I realised that it wasn’t something that had ever troubled me, and it struck me that if I hadn’t seen the Disney original, then the film’s narrative punchlines would have made no sense whatsoever.

It’s not helped by a meandering middle act – a sort of migratory lion road movie – and the weirdest villains ever, a pride of marauding super lions, headed up by Mads Mikkelson’s Kiros, whose chief qualification for being evil is that they are white. As messaging goes it was hardly subtle.

To add to the general sense of alienation, the whole thing is framed as a story within a story, recounted by John Kani’s mandrill, Rafiki, to Mufasa’s cub granddaughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter). There’s no clear reason for this aside from allowing Seth Rogan and Billy Eichner to reprise their Pumbaa and Timon double act and make a lot of meta film industry gags, only serving to slow the whole thing down and confuse younger members of the audience.
But, like I say, it looks great, and Lin Manuel Miranda’s songs aren’t bad – even if they mostly outstay their welcome. They’re all at least one verse and chorus too long. I kept thinking: ‘Shut up and kill something’.

Verdict: Mufasa: The Lion King is undeniably engaging as a piece of cinematic spectacle, but it’s a saggy affair, that would have been a lot more truthful and compelling if it wasn’t so busy being ‘realistic’. 5/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com