Posted in: Disney, Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Review | Tagged: Mufasa: the Lion King

Mufasa: The Lion King Review: The Prequel Stumbles More Than It Roars

Mufasa: The Lion King is yet another Disney film that isn't good enough to merit any praise but also not bad enough to be interesting.

Mufasa: The Lion King is yet another return to VHS-era Disney with uninspiring songs, an animation style that hurts more than it helps, and a story that had potential but is unable to be compelling enough to have the audience forget that they know how this story ends.

Director: Barry Jenkins
Summary: Mufasa, a lost and alone cub, meets a sympathetic lion named Taka, the heir to a royal bloodline. The chance meeting sets in motion an expansive journey of a group of misfits searching for their destiny.

Mufasa: The Lion King is Another Prequel with Zero Tension

When doing a prequel or something based on a true story, you are coming into it on your back foot. Your audience already knows how this story will end, specifically if it includes characters we all know will survive. You have to create a story compelling enough for the audience to forget that they know how this ends. When it works, it works extremely well, but when it doesn't, it leads to drawn-out scenes that are supposed to feel perilous or tense but lack any sort of emotion. Why would you be worried? This character isn't going to die, they aren't going to get seriously hurt, we know they are going to be fine.

Sometimes, prequels will circumvent this by introducing a new character whose fate we don't know, but that isn't what Mufasa: The Lion King did. Instead, the characters are all ones whose fate we already know, and the movie is not compelling enough to make you forget that everyone on screen will ultimately be fine. The film already feels stretched so thin you can see through it, and knowing not only the fate of these characters but ultimately their character arcs doesn't help. The few things they do try that are different don't really hit as it all feels generic and a story we've seen before from Disney.

There is the nugget of a good idea here, but Mufasa: The Lion King is not a feature-length story, and that becomes more obvious the more times the film cuts back to its own framing device. That's also the excuse to cut back to Timone and Pumbaa jumping in every ten minutes or so to add their commentary to the story Rafiku is trying to tell like this is Mystery Science Theater 3000 with horrifying CGI animals.

If this framing device, telling Simba's daughter the story of her grandfather, bookended the film, it wouldn't be such an issue, but the film's already slow pacing grinds to a halt so fast every time they cut back to it that the metaphorical airbags risk being deployed.

The extremely stretched-out narrative and weird pacing choices might be forgiven if there were a few good songs in there, but this is the second Disney movie in less than a month without a bop to be found. Unlike Moana 2, where everyone cited Lin Manuel Miranda not being on the film for the music being terrible, Mufasa: The Lion King does have Miranda making the music, but it's still awful. So that two-week period where we all thought Miranda was the secret sauce of modern-day Disney songs is over because there's nothing here even worth humming save for callbacks to the original film's score. You have Mads Mikkelsen as a crazed white lion singing; not a word is memorable.

The Animation Style Didn't Work In 2019, And It Doesn't Work In 2024

However, among everything else, the thing that really makes Mufasa: The Lion King a huge nothingurger is the live-action animation style. This was a problem with the 2019 film as well. Once you got beyond scenes like Circle of Life, where character faces and expressions were not as important because it was a music scene above all else, the film fell apart because you can't make realistic-looking lions have expressive faces. They also have the same problem in this film where the only distinguishing factor between the different lions is often the color, and the colors are not that varied. In the original movie, Scar was recognizable from his silhouette, and so was Mufasa. Even Simba was unique from his father in his own way.

If Disney wanted to change the animation style for new Lion King films, nothing stopped them from adapting the films using post-Tangled-era computer graphics. That would have changed things significantly while also preserving the fact that you need these characters to look distinct from one another. Pumbaa is the most obvious example of why this translation does not work; Pumbaa is cute and fun in the animated movie, but a realistic warthog with long stringy hair just looks weird, and there isn't anything endearing about him no matter how many fourth wall breaks Seth Rogan might make.

All of this adds up to a movie that is yet another Disney film this year that isn't good enough to merit any praise, but also not bad enough to be interesting. It's just fine, and Mufasa: The Lion King will certainly have fans, specifically those who enjoyed the previous film. However, for those who weren't on board for the previous remake, this one will certainly not be the thing that will convert you. The legacy of this film will be people wondering how something that feels like it would be right at home during the direct-to-VHS era managed to get a budget this big and a theatrical release. The irony, however, that the Lion King sequel that came out of that era is better than this prequel should not be lost on anyone.

Mufasa: The Lion King

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Review by Kaitlyn Booth

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5.5/10

Mufasa: The Lion King is yet another return to VHS-era Disney with uninspiring songs, an animation style that hurts more than it helps, and a story that had potential but is unable to be compelling enough to have the audience forget that they know how this story ends.

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