Mufasa: The Lion King Throws Barry Jenkins and More Into the VR-Animal Void

The astonishing technology that the Walt Disney Company utilizes on movies like Mufasa: The Lion King is like something out of a science fiction story – specifically, a cautionary tale that features some kind of cosmic-ironic curse. Here is a virtual filmmaking rig that can conjure vast landscapes and photorealistic animal characters, allowing the artists total freedom of camera movement and image design, and yet no matter how much talent is thrown into its ravenous maw – Barry Jenkins! Lin-Manuel Miranda! A rotating/accumulating group of fabulously charismatic actors and singers! – it spits out the same lifeless talking-animal dross, while demanding further victims to fuel the creation of sequels, prequels, and, presumably, eventually higher-tech remakes of high-tech remakes.

To that end, maybe the sequel to the remake of the remake of the decade-old TV cartoon The Lion Guard will solve the problems introduced by The Lion King (2019) and inherited by Mufasa (2024). In the meantime, Jenkins (Moonlight), surely one of the most distinctly gifted of the many talented directors to submit themselves to the Disney machine, struggles more mightily than his outmatched predecessor Jon Favreau to bend this technology to his will. While Favreau was stuck un-imagining iconic moments and sequences from the 1994 animated classic, Jenkins obviously wants to use his VR movie to compose: To figure out shots, points of view, and sequences that bring these eerily realistic animals and their environments to life, even or especially if it means bending their realism a bit into something more poetic or magical. Yet no matter the effort he puts into it, Jenkins is working with the creative equivalent of vaporware; his virtual camera floats listlessly around animated lions communicating with dialogue that sounds hurried, packed into odd spaces, with a pervasive ADR quality. Of course, this is animation. All of the dialogue is looped in. What sets this apart from traditional animation is that the voices, no matter how mellifluous, and the songs, no matter how Broadway-ready, never stop feeling disembodied. These lions are living in the simulation.

Alas, what they’re doing there is not terribly interesting, though it is admittedly less tedious than last time. The story of Mufasa manages to recall both the kiddie-Shakespeare drama of the 1994 original and the chintzy framing of the direct-to-video-style sequels and spinoffs that 21st century Disney has promoted to theaters. When lion princess Kiara (Blue Ivy) is left in care of various sidekicks while her parents (Donald Glover and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, spending a combined eight minutes in the recording booth or possibly on their Bluetooth from their limousines) attend to the birth of her new sibling, Rafiki (John Kani) favors her, along with interrupting comic relief Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen), with a family story. He offers the heretofore unseen origin of her grandfather Mufasa, memorably voiced by James Earl Jones in both previous versions of the story, and played here by Braelyn Rankins (as a cub) and Aaron Pierre (as a grown but still young lion).

Separated from his own parents by a flood, Mufasa is saved by lion prince Taka (Theo Somolu, then Kelvin Harrison Jr.), adopted into though never fully accepted by Taka’s pride. (There are welcome shades of a few other Disney animated classics here: Tarzan and The Jungle Book.) When their family is threatened by a group of outcast white lions led by Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), Taka and Mufasa go on a journey with lioness Sarabi (Tiffany Boone), chattering hornbill Zazu (Preston Nyman, replacing John Oliver) and a younger Rafiki in search of a new home, with the bad lions in pursuit. A road movie/long-distance chase is as workable an outline as any, providing plenty of opportunity for characters to break into Miranda’s songs – or rather, both too much and not enough. Not enough, because seven tunes (including two under two minutes) don’t cover a lot of ground in a two-hour movie; and too much, because Jenkins, like Favreau before him, can hardly sustain musical-number staging in this endlessly uncanny valley that often feels actively hostile to the bounciness of so many traditionally animated Disney numbers. Miranda is the best of the modern Disney-affiliated composers, and you spend a chunk of the movie picturing how neat some of his new stuff would be if it was accompanied by work from the company’s normal animation group, rather than CG lions designed specifically to look like they do not want to sing.

Of course, a traditionally animated version of Mufasa would still be a wan prequel to The Lion King. But at least the material would have a chance in hell. Even with Jenkins at the helm, and despite the real-world weight these characters are designed to maintain, this faux-live-action Mufasa often feels unsteady. The mobile camera searches for an eye-catching vantage, and occasionally finds one, often involving reflective surfaces like ice or water, only to be fractured by antsy editing that interrupts the action more often than Timon and Pumbaa, without any of the laughs. (Eichner and Rogen are, as ever, consistently amusing.) Little of the movie, whether action sequences, emotional crescendos, or musical numbers, finds a consistent rhythm. One sequence featuring a nest of bees and an elephant stampede actually cuts together pretty well. But most of the time Jenkins, with his gift for zeroing in on the intricacies of the human face, finds no such purchase in a bunch of fake animals (though he does finally try his hand at a Disney version of his signature piercing-look-at-the-camera shot).

Mufasa isn’t the most purely deadening of this Disney remake cycle; just as it’s hard to top the colorful, concise, lovingly made 1994 Lion King, it’s hard to under-bid the turgid, color-drained, virtual prison of that 2019 theme-park remake. Jenkins brings a little more color and variety to the proceedings, and even a smidgen of royal-family bitchiness in the early dynamics of Mufasa’s adopted family – though the lion who would be Scar, through no fault of Harrison’s, doesn’t exactly give us access to the fullness of his emotional journey. The takeaway ultimately has less to do with the characters or story at hand than the resources: What tremendous volume of them have gone into making the worst Barry Jenkins movie! And to avoid thinking of or paying for an all-new cartoon! And to keep on lionizing what needed no further lions.

Director: Barry Jenkins
Writer: Jeff Nathanson
Starring: Aaron Pierre, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Mads Mikkelsen, John Kani, Tiffany Boone, Preston Nyman, Seth Rogen, Billy Eichner, Blue Ivy Carter
Release date: December 20, 2024

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.