When it was announced that Barry Jenkins was going to be directing Disney’s prequel to their 2019 “live-action” recreation of The Lion King, so many in the entertainment sphere reacted with disbelief -in the realm of movie discourse, even betrayal. Here was the man behind one of the best Best Picture winners of the 2010s, a visionary, serious filmmaker agreeing to devote several years of his life to a movie that would be made mostly in an LA visual effects warehouse, tied to a franchise within the biggest media conglomerate in the world, and without anywhere near the creative freedom he’d enjoyed on any of his prior projects. It was baffling.
Jenkins defended himself and provided some insight into why he agreed to make the movie in a great piece by Matt Zoller Seitz for Vulture. It’s not like the idea is completely worthless -it is in fact the rare case of Disney not directly remaking a prior success but leap-frogging off of it into a new story. And with Jenkins’s relationship to African-American art, The Lion King -which in the modern era has become decidedly African-American- provides perhaps a new lens for that subject. Also, it is an interesting filmmaker tackling something in scope and in production process that is completely new for them. Surely there is valid curiosity to what a Barry Jenkins-directed big budget effects blockbuster would be.
Still, Mufasa is required to maintain that connection to 2019’s The Lion King, the aftermath of which forms the framing device for this movie: a young Kiara, daughter of Simba and Nala -voiced by Beyonce’s own daughter Blue Ivy Carter- is told the story of her grandfather by Rafiki (John Kani) while her parents are away. Mufasa is revealed to have been born to a humble background, with just his parents and a collective of other animals in some far-off part of the Savannah. He is separated from them in a great flood and is found by a fellow cub called Taka whose royal lion family takes him in. As young adults, Mufasa, now voiced by Aaron Pierre, and Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), set out on a quest to find a fabled land called Milele when a pride of white lions kills their family and subsequently hunts them for revenge for the death of their king’s son.
The Lion King famously took heavy inspiration from Shakespeare, particularly Hamlet and Henry V, so it is somewhat fitting that Mufasa draws on the even older story of Moses -with the figure of the Pharaoh split between the villain Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen) and the brother Taka, who of course will become Scar. It plays out this allegory in a fairly straight and simple way, Mufasa’s perfect instinctual leadership contrasted in Taka’s comparative meekness in spite of his being the heir to his pride’s throne. The relationship between Taka and Mufasa and how the two will have their falling out is one of the story’s big dramatic selling points, hinted at on two occasions where Taka saves Mufasa’s life that mirror his eventual betrayal. Though the film sets up points of seeming contention in the immense expectations on Taka’s destiny and Mufasa’s indirect role in the death of Taka’s family, it fails to deliver on any feelings of resentment until the most shallow of breaking points: Sarabi (Tiffany Boone), whom they meet along the journey and who Taka falls fast and awkwardly for, only for her to be more interested in Mufasa -which sends the previously friendly Taka into a moral tailspin, suddenly very concerned with these transgressions he hadn’t been before.
Mufasa’s motivations are no less mediocre, though Pierre does bring some conviction to them. He is imbued with an innate greatness essentially from birth, it’s only a question of how it will manifest. The story is of his becoming the Lion King, but he very much occupies that role already for the duration of the story; his courage, his firm sense of right, his supernaturally-guided knowledge, even his oratory skills are fixed. There’s no real developmental journey to be had the way there was with Simba, and he’s less compelling a protagonist as a result.
Perhaps he is archetypal on purpose, but whether or not that is the case, it might not make a substantial difference because of the way he is portrayed physically that saps almost any degree of investment. Jenkins inherited a pretty terrible aesthetic from Jon Favreau and there is very little he can do to salvage the empty expressionless faces of the photo-realistic animals (with a single exception in Rafiki) that look confoundingly bored through much of the movie -even in action or musical sequences. However, unlike Favreau -who pursued realism as far as he could to the greater detriment of the reenactment, Jenkins looks more to the 1994 original; and in conjunction with his own instincts of visual storytelling, attempts some very dynamic and interesting filmmaking. Whether it be in his standard head-on shots, his long unbroken takes that swerve around the characters, artfully construed compositions, motifs like the one between Mufasa and Taka noted earlier, or the editing through song sequences (one of which grows the cubs up like “Hakuna Matata”), you can see a director struggling to articulate his specific voice against constraining technical material. There were several points where I felt if the imagery were rendered in classical animation, the movie on a whole would ring a good deal more strongly.
What would also improve it is if it weren’t periodically interrupted by visits back to the framing device, inserted simply to give space to awful, sometimes fourth-wall breaking comedic commentary from Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen). You can almost feel the movie being yanked away from Jenkins in these moments and into the hands of Disney executives, it is so much more pandering than everything else. Though even in the prime narrative, the storytelling isn’t so tight. The arrival of Sarabi, Rafiki, and Zazu (Preston Nyman) -almost all at once- marks the film’s transition into the dullest of prequel impulses, even with one good Rafiki scene. And the last act feels exceptionally short, as what would be the Pride Land very quickly falls under Mufasa’s sway for the sake of defeating the villain. For a climax that espouses the power in numbers and broad unity, it does very emphatically put Mufasa forward as immediate divine god-king of these creatures. Some of the songs -original musical numbers by, who else, Lin-Manuel Miranda- feel dropped more strategically than organically, and generally don’t make much of an impression. Elton John is a tough act to follow, though Miranda does well enough with a couple songs, namely “Milele” and “I Always Wanted a Brother” -though the staging of those songs probably has more to do with their effect.
All that said, the movie’s opening genuinely sends a shiver down your spine …with merely a black screen and a score under Mufasa’s most famous line as read by his originator James Earl Jones. It is a dedication, and one last chance for the magic of that profoundly moving voice to greet us in the theatre. It starkly reminds us a good chunk of the power of Mufasa the character was directly tied to Jones himself. And he never demanded any kind of a backstory. Jenkins brought along a lot of his usual collaborators for this movie -cinematographer James Laxton, editor Joi MacMillon, composer Nicholas Brittel, and producer Adele Romanski. And thank goodness for that, as all seem to be trying their best to do some good work with this movie, make it better than the mundane standard of these remakes. And they do succeed to some level -it widely eclipses The Lion King and a lot of other Disney remake garbage. But its constraints are too evident, and in several respects it was a futile project from the get-go. Jenkins’s artistry is there, but obscured by muck. I don’t think the experiment paid off.
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