The Lion King is a timeless classic. Released during a golden period for Disney Studios, it remains a touchstone for many viewers as a demonstration of what animation can do. Jon Favreau’s photo-realistic digital animation remake may also come to occupy a significant place in animation history, specifically in terms of its animation. As a visual feast, The Lion King 2019 is dazzlingly realised. Descriptions of the film as ‘live action’ are nonsensical – everything is animated here as surely as it was in the original. The difference is that it looks real – from the lustrous fur including lions’ manes that you want to run your hands through, to the textured skin of elephants and warthogs to rippling water and intricate blades of grass, the African landscape looks as rich and tactile as that in a documentary. Indeed, at times a voiceover would not seem out of place, recalling both BBC nature documentaries and Disney’s ‘Real-Life’ adventures of previous decades. Yet the illusion of reality is easily broken by the talking and singing of the photo-realistic animals, and this break is hard to get away from.

The lifelike visuals are simultaneously the film’s greatest strength and its most crippling weakness. There is an inescapable disjunct as the visuals look real, but quite clearly are not. Similarly, the animals are anthropomorphised, but not by much. They speak and sing, but their faces remain largely blank and their movements are appropriate for animals. It is therefore hard to relax into the film, as one constantly marvels at the visuals and is then jerked out of the marvel by the obvious artifice. In addition, one may have to keep reminding themselves that of course lion social dynamics do not work that way, this being a fictional drama, but that concern never arose in the original, fantastical animation.

A further problem is that this film does nothing new narratively. Previous Disney remakes elaborated on the previous versions, expanding characters, updating representation and, in some cases, reducing or omitting the songs altogether. Unlike Favreau’s previous Disney remake, The Jungle Book, which works as an entirely new adaptation of the source material, The Lion King 2019 makes almost no changes to the original story. The Lion King is an original story (borrowing some elements from Hamlet), and as an original story for an animated family adventure, it is hard to improve on. Screenwriter Jeff Nathanson expands some scenes and provides some additional detail to a few characters, including Nala (Beyoncé Knowles-Carter), Shenzi (Florence Kasumba) and Sarabi (Alfre Woodard). This development of female characters does continue Disney’s greater diversity and improvements in representation, but because the rest of the film follows the original so closely, these expansions create a further disjunctive element. The end result is ambivalent, as the visuals are utterly stunning and incredible, but the film lacks soul and emotional engagement.