The fur looks more silkily luxurious in “Mufasa: The Lion King,” the African landscapes bolder and brighter, but much remains the same in its horizonless empire. Just five years ago, in the photorealistic remake of the first “Lion King,” Mufasa — the big cool cat then voiced with imperial gravitas by James Earl Jones — was ruling his animated kingdom with the kind of benevolent authoritarianism that suggests Hollywood isn’t the progressive hotbed it’s reputed to be. By the end, villainy was vanquished, order restored and hereditary monarchy reconfirmed. The circle of life, as the song goes, remained reassuringly unbroken.
That circle has proved to be more of an inexorably expanding spiral for Disney over the years. The first movie, a seamless blend of old and new tech, opened in 1994 to acclaim and chart-topping box office, scooping up a bounty of awards and strengthening the studio’s emerging status as an industry behemoth. In the decades since, the film spawned straight-to-video follow-ups, several animated TV shows, a Broadway hit, theme-park attractions and several projects from Beyoncé — she voiced Mufasa’s queen consort, Nala, in the 2019 remake — among them “Black Is King,” a feature-length film version of her companion album.
Beyoncé and her daughter Blue Ivy Carter, as a cub named Kiara, are featured in “Mufasa,” a more technologically advanced photorealistic addition to this Disney juggernaut. An origin story that evolves largely in segmented flashbacks, the movie tracks its title character on an adventure crammed with dangers, none human, and features the usual cavalcade of novel and returning voices. (Some are more welcome than others; Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner again voice the hyperventilated Pumbaa and Timon.) Among the franchise’s shepherds here are the director Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”), the writer Jeff Nathanson and the songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda, who’s contributed seven tunes.
The overall results are generally pretty, mildly diverting, at times dull and often familiar, despite a few unusually sharp, brief departures from Disney’s pacifying formula. Once again, the story opens with sweep and quickly narrows to focus on a male cub on an odyssey of self-discovery that includes peril, romance, too much wan comedy and a firm affirmation of his royal birthright that comes with an anxious side order of populism. This time Mufasa is the young hero (voiced as a cub by Braelyn Rankins and as an adult by Aaron Pierre). He enters the nuzzling embrace of his mother, Afia (Anika Noni Rose) and father, Masego (Keith David), but is soon swept away into a new realm and the fold of an adopted family.
Some of those involved in the making of the original “Lion King” were fond of citing “Hamlet” as one of its influences, an amusing, self-aggrandizing association. Here, at least, Mufasa seems more like a leonine variation on Charlton Heston’s Moses in 1956 film “The Ten Commandments” in that he’s an outsider destined for greatness who’s raised by royals and finds a tricky surrogate brother in the new family’s princeling, Taka (voiced by Theo Somolu and Kelvin Harrison Jr.). Mufasa endures hardship and also wages battle against rival lions, led by Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen) — superpredators with white fur that, like previous waves of colonizers in Africa, seek to dominate everything they don’t kill outright.
The introduction of a pride of white marauders — and nod to colonialization — is a welcome jolt of daring into this saga. That’s especially true because, like most big-studio movies out for world domination, this one’s bid at verisimilitude — evident in its scrupulous mimicry, in the ridges of feathers, in the brightly popping flowers and billowing clouds — is in service to a movie that’s been optimized to appeal to everyone. It’s no surprise, given the advances in digital animation (A.I. was used for the 2019 movie), that the fur and fangs here look more persuasively realistic than they have in the past. Even so, the creatures are still the same talking, singing, ingratiating people in animal drag that they’ve long been in Disney movies.
That’s true even if Jenkins’s touch is evident in the casting. Most of the adult voices have warm, emotional expressivity, with John Kani’s red-faced adult mandrill, Rafiki, elevating every scene he’s in. The children sound similarly natural, with none of the customary treacly mewling that can be as unbearable as claws dragged across stone. Still, any hope that Jenkins would assert more authorship here than Disney does fades by the time the adult Mufasa is singing an insipid love duet with his crush, Sarabi (Tiffany Boone). Romance as well as families and their problems remain the studio’s storybook givens as do the animals’ discreet dietary habits. Never fear, no (literal) throats were ripped out in the making of this movie.
In the end, every ferociously bared fang and extended claw in “Mufasa” remains safely blunted. That’s to be expected in a children’s movie, of course, but what is finally most striking about this series is that as the technology has evolved, the gulf between its natural world and our own has grown exponentially wider. The portrayal of the animal figures is now so vividly realistic that at times you can you can almost feel the velvet of Mufasa’s cub fur in your fingertips, much as you would with a house cat. There’s something pleasant in that even if — bummer alert! — it is starting to seem like Disney, with its galloping herds, cavorting troops and colorfully feathered flocks, is busily modeling the natural world before it disappears.
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