THE LION KING: If the term ‘uncanny valley’ was a movie

If you’re looking for a movie that feels like a bunch of bad actors, this ones for you.

A review by Write Owl

I’d rather bash my head against my keyboard than spend another £10, on this Lion King remake, it felt like a film with a bunch of bad actors.

The new Lion King movie, which is still in the debates on whether it is live action or not, is the prime example as to why we made movies in the first place.

We use movies as a way to escape the boring morbid nature that is reality and create an entire new universe that wouldn’t occur in real life.

I thought if it would be any Movie studio, it would be Disney who would understand that we use movies as a break from our boring lives.

I understand that realism within a movie is what makes it more believable, but there is such thing as too much realism you know?

The movie follows the exact same plot as the original 1994 cartoon, with minor changes to the use of songs and a few added lines. Spoiler, these changes weren’t good. In fact, the only good thing about the film is what they kept the same.

They decided to remove the infamous and my most faviourite Disney villain song ‘Be Prepare,’ sung by the antagonist Scar, with what I’d like to describe as an evil poem. Don’t get me wrong I love Chiwetel Ejiofor, but if they could bring back James Earl Jones for Mufasa, why couldn’t they allow the original voice of scar, Jeremy Irons to return?

Don’t even get me started on Beyonce, I love the queen B but this isn’t her set to be in. Her voice sticks out like a sour thumb, dare I say it.

Honestly the only good aspect of the entire film was Timon and Pumbaa, who livened up the entire movie, for those of us who fell asleep in the back. Which is sad since they don’t get as much screen time as the protagonists.

In my opinion Disney’s main priority when making this film was to show off their capabilities, they wanted to prove that they were capable of recreating an entire environment using photo realistic animation. But we don’t want to see reality on a screen, we want to see the fictional world of The Lion King.

Seeing these Lions on these plain landscapes, moving in the most uncanniest way, is not what I paid £10’s for. If I wanted to see this, I’d switch on the BBC and have a good old conversation with David Attenborough.

Big cats are known to communicate primarily through body language, whereas humans communicate mainly with facial expressions, do you see the problem here? Watching these animals open and close their mouths with little to no emotion, is exactly the same as going to see a movie with a bunch of bad acting. It makes no sense.

To top it all off, Lions do not move in the unrealistic way that Disney is trying to create, so it leaves us with these emotionless animals moving very unnaturally on the screen. This is what leaves us with the uncanny feeling we get when viewing this film.

In my honest opinion, this film would only make sense to those who have seen the original. For example, there is a moment when Rafiki reaches for is staff and calls it ‘my old friend,’ despite the fact that it wasn’t shown throughout this remake until we reach this point in the movie.

If you’ve seen the original there’s no need to watch the remake because you’re not missing out on much. If you haven’t seen the original don’t watch this version, because it won’t make much sense to you in some moments.

Afterall there are plenty of other Disney movies that is worth your money more than this one.