The songs are all just slightly worse-thanks to Glover and Beyoncé, “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” now has, like, 300 percent more melisma, to no particular effect-except for Scar’s here’s-my-evil plan jam “Be Prepared,” which now sounds like bargain-basement Leonard Cohen and is much, much worse. This inspired in me not so much happiness as passive contentment, not so much wonder as mere recognition. In the theater, I found myself yearning for the shots to be exact, and often they more or less were: When a mourning Simba runs away and passes out in a pitless desert, you get the shadows of the vultures crossing over him, and then the vultures themselves framed by the pitiless sun. (That’s not repeated here, but the shot of Scar-now voiced by Chiwetel Ejiofor-looming over a doomed Mufasa-voiced, as in the original, by the ever-mighty James Earl Jones-is a bit more chilling.) The fact that the first words spoken in the original are Scar’s lament, “Life’s not fair, is it?” (Now changed to “Life’s not fair, is it, my little friend?” which like almost everything here is not worse, or better, so much as it’s just more.)Įverything You Need to Know About ‘The Lion King’ All of the Little Things That Made the Original ‘The Lion King’ So Great How the Original ‘Lion King’ Came to Life Seven Pressing Questions About the New ‘Lion King’ (Favreau emulates plenty of these, and yet his Pride Rock looks neither as majestic during the Good Times nor as elegantly dessicated during the Bad Times.) The Jaws-style zoom onto Simba’s shocked face as his evil uncle Scar triggers the wildebeest stampede that will claim the life of Scar’s brother and Simba’s father, Mufasa. The painterly landscapes, low-key but high-return, of trees and sunrises and storms and paw prints and whatnot. It turns out that the primary sources of joy and wonder in the 1994 Lion King, directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, are not so much the big things-the Elton John songs, the Elton John–sized emotions-as the little things.
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