My daughter sits in a movie theater, squinting at the screen. The lions move like real animals but speak with human voices. Their faces, meant to show emotion, remain frozen in an uncanny valley between reality and animation. Usually able to recall every character's name and detail when presented with livelier spectacles like Sonic the Hedgehog 3, she remembers nothing. Instead, she takes frequent bathroom breaks, perhaps seeking refuge from the lifeless spectacle before her.
This is Mufasa, Disney's prequel to their remake of The Lion King, a film that exists not because anyone yearned to know the backstory of a character who died 30 minutes into the original, but because fealty to the god of shareholder value demanded it. The accountants looked at the billion-dollar success that was the unnecessary remake and ordered another serving of the same tasteless dish.
The movie tells us Mufasa, formerly endowed with the late James Earl Jones’ bass rumble, wasn't born royal. He was a wandering nobody who lost his parents in a flood, rescued by the family of another lion named Taka. Through a race that Taka loses on purpose, he secures his place in a pride ruled by a king who'd rather eat him than adopt him. The females hunt while the males laze about, a simplification that ignores how real male lions hunt buffalo and hippos, bringing down the largest prey. But reality has no place in a film built on market research rather than storytelling.
The computerized animals move with the precision of figures in a 3D nature documentary reconstruction but speak their lines with all the emotion of automated customer service. Their faces, more or less scientifically accurate, can’t convey a fraction of the human drama the script demands. No amount of technical achievement can bridge this gap between reality and fantasy. The result feels like watching taxidermized animals perform Shakespeare.
Even the villain's story—Taka's transformation into Scar—lands without impact. The betrayal that earns him his famous scar comes wrapped in modern messaging about toxic masculinity and incel rage, themes that feel shoehorned into a stupid story about realistic talking animals who occasionally break into ChatGPT-penned show tunes. The white-maned antagonist lions arrive as metaphors so obvious they might as well wear swastikas around their necks in the manner of vintage Indiana Jones antagonists.
The voice actors do what they can to earn their pay envelopes. But Aaron Pierre isn't the aforementioned James Earl Jones, and Kelvin Harrison can't match Jeremy Irons' elegant menace (don’t worry: Irons is busy being wasted in drivel like the Watchmen extended universe on HBO). Other new voices echo through the uncanny valley like deepfake replacements for the real thing. Poor Mads Mikkelsen, endowed with one of the most recognizable of Hollywood names (yet all too easily confused, at least by me, with Bill and Alexander Skarsgård), is trapped in a one-dimensional role as the leader of the rival white lion pride and can't find anything interesting to do with his lines.
Barry Jenkins, better served as a director of fine human stories like 2016’s Moonlight but surely better paid doing dreck like this, seems lost in this digital savanna. His camera tracks across landscapes that look real but feel artificial. The one-note songs arrive on schedule but without joy. The humor falls flat. The drama never takes flight. Nothing could achieve exit velocity in this lifeless world.
Kids like my daughter watch movies differently than the C-suite thinks they do. They don't care about market forces or quarterly earnings reports; they won’t buy into things merely because the numbers say they should. They want wonder, magic, characters they can love. Instead, Mufasa gives them a corporate product made by algorithms and focus groups. The result is a film that exists because it can, not because it should.
In the old days of hand-drawn animation, imperfection allowed for expression. A lion could look like anything the artist wanted as long as it sold the emotion and action to the viewers. The drawings weren't realistic, but they were true. Now we have lions that look real but come off as fake, speaking their lines through faces that not only can't convey what they're meant to feel but can’t be distinguished one from the other.
This is modern Disney—not the house that frozen Walt and his dream teams built but the one accountants and CGI imagineers now run. They mine their past for content, certain that familiarity with the intellectual property will bring audiences back. But IP familiarity isn't movie magic. Technical achievement doesn’t lead to wonder. And children, eagerly racing to take long bathroom breaks in poorly-ventilated theaters, know the difference.
The original hand-drawn Lion King remains beloved by many because it told a story worth telling. Mufasa exists because the CGI remake made money. The difference shows in every colorless frame, every muted expression, every moment that prioritizes dreary technical excellence over emotional truth. This is cinema as content, movies as product, art reduced to asset management.
My daughter deserves better than this. She deserves stories that make her forget she's sitting in theaters—Jim Carrey camping it up, Riddler-style, as a pair of Dr. Robotniks in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 came much closer to the mark—not ones that send her searching for excuses to leave. All kids deserve magic, not market research. They deserve animals that can smile with their hearts, not just bare the canines in their scientifically accurate faces.
My daughter leaves the theater, rapidly forgetting what she's seen. The lookalike lions, so real yet so false, fade from her short-term memory. Later that day, she'll watch the original Lion King again at home, where those hand-drawn characters know how to make her feel, how to make her care, how to make her believe in talking animals and the stories that real working artists can use them to tell.