The Lion King is a classic movie that many, including myself, used to watch as a child, but recently a prequel/sequel has been created called Mufasa the Lion King. Since I enjoyed the first movie as a child, I decided to go visit my local theater to go see it on the best screen, best audio, best seats for my best experience. Even with all these things, my movie experience felt very mediocre. This movie at face value isn’t necessarily bad, but it doesn’t have the same magic that the first one has.
Mufasa the Lion King felt rushed and slow at the same time. The story at the beginning of the movie felt fast and didn’t give me a lot of time to understand what was happening or going on and once I did find my footing in the story, I got lost again. Throughout the movie I was trying to correlate this with the original and it was hard to stay engaged with the movie because of that. My biggest complaint is about the pacing of the movie. The story of the Mufasa was being told by a narrator in the aftermath of the first movie. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is when after a big chunk of the story was over there was random dialogue from the characters that interrupted the story. Kind of like the movie the Prince’s Bride, but more irritating.
While the original Lion King is known for its songs like Hakuna Matata, the new one does not have any songs that stick out and will be remembered for years on, which is a shame. None of the songs are rememberable. The songs didn’t really flow well with the story even though the song’s entire purpose was to make sense of the story. This aspect of the movie made me feel upset, since the first movie’s songs were a very prominent part of the movie.
This movie didn’t have any acting, and it was all animation. I think it’s a specific animation where they make the actors wear black suits with white balls on them and then later animate their movements into the realistic animation that we see with live action remakes of movies. The visual effects in this movie are extremely well done and it looks very realistic. While this is the movie’s strongest aspect it felt kind of expected. While it looks and feels immersive with the large screen and loud spatial audio in the theater, it was not enough to give this movie any redemption for everything else it lacks.
The dialogue and voice acting in this movie doesn’t redeem the missed opportunities that this movie was speculated to have. The dialogue is just very mediocre and not very special. It feels very generalized and uninspired. This feels bad especially since this movie is supposed to inspire, yet it lacks any true inspiration. The voice acting also has the same problem of feeling uninspired but wasn’t anything that’ll knock your socks off. The voice acting just felt very lackluster in the same exact way as the dialogue.
Overall, this movie seemed like a good idea, but really just not a great addition to an already great franchise. This movie doesn’t bring anything special or anything fun like movie’s previously have. This movie is just mediocre and lackluster which doesn’t make my trip to the theater feel justified.
