Let’s Talk About That Lion King Teaser

MegaSoulhero Happy Thanksgiving! I’m sure we are all thankful for a lot of things. But you know what I am NOT thankful for? Disney’s live action remakes. Yeah, Disney has been going crazy with remaking some of their older films and it has gotten very annoying. Next year, they have 3 coming out. Dumbo, Aladdin, and of course, the Lion King. Since the Lion King is one of my favorite movies of all time, I was very angered when I found out they were remaking it. This Thanksgiving, they released a teaser for the movie. What did I think of it? I actually kinda liked it.

Yeah, I genuinely liked this teaser. The visuals look very beautiful, the music is phenomenal, and that last shot of Simba roaring gave me chills. It was also great hearing James Earl Jones’ voice again. It really does look beautiful. However, that doesn’t mean I’m entirely excited for it. One of my biggest fears that I’ve had regarding this remake is that it might end up being too much like the original. From this teaser, it kind of looks like that might be happening. Each shot just looks like a photorealistic version of various shots from the original. Like Rafiki holding up Simba, the wildebeest stampede, even the shot of the animals going to see their new future king looks almost exactly the same. I’m hoping this is one of those instances where the teaser shows us shots that look similar to the original just to get people excited and ends up saving the new stuff for another trailer or for the movie. Again, this is Jon Favreau we are talking about. He made the live action Jungle Book movie which I actually liked. The great thing about that movie is that it felt similar to the original, but at the same time had enough differences in it to make it stand out as its own thing.

Another thing that worries me is the animal characters themselves. Since they’re going out of their way to make these animals look and act as realistic as possible, it would be hard to give them humanized expressions. It worked in the original movie because it was basically a cartoon and they were given more human type expressions which made it easy to have them show emotion through their facials. With this one, it doesn’t look like the animals are showing any emotion. Because, again, they’re supposed to look like real animals. Which is a problem when 100% of the characters are animals. In the live action Jungle Book, the animals weren’t very expressive through their facials, but the movie mostly focused on the human character. So it wasn’t that big of a problem here. Unfortunately, every single character in this movie is an animal. So it might be hard to understand the emotions of these characters. That makes me worried.

Again, I thought the teaser was pretty good. Not as amazing as people say it is, but I’m still surprised I ended up not hating it like I thought I would. I’m still not very excited for the movie, but I do have some hope for it now.

Comments

They got a great director to do the movie. Hopefully Simba can be improved upon how bland he was - iliekpiez

The CGI looked so real! - FuffleyandPeetah