Pride Rock and Prejudice: MUFASA: THE LION KING

Mufasa is actually pretty interesting as a Barry Jenkins movie. It’s about community and family forged in opposition to societal pressures to segregate and denigrate. It’s about parents and children pulled apart and finding their ways back to a sense of normality. It’s about the power of legacy, and the cyclical echoes of generational struggle. It’s about a young person trying to find his way in the world, defining himself both with and against what the world tells him he should be. So it’s definitely of a piece with the thematic preoccupations of the director of tender dramas Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk and his broader, metaphorical Underground Railroad. It also has some of his visual interest in a camera that’s motivated by its subjects' movements, joined to their physicality and their interiority. It has some of those Demme-style head-on close-ups and supple, floating motion through its sun-dappled production design. It’s a Jenkins work through and through. You might have to squint a little to see it in this movie, and might miss it if you weren’t prompted to be on the lookout, but there it is nonetheless.

Consider that something of a miracle considering glimpses of heartfelt, recognizably personal material and approach are fighting their way out of the packaging of a prequel to Disney’s 2019 photorealistic computer animated remake of The Lion King. That nadir of the company’s current cycle of remaking its animated classics was a bizarre heartless photocopy—an often shot-for-shot re-rendering of the colorful and expressive big cat Hamlet that studiously sucked every ounce of life from the original hand-drawn lines. The inexpressive realism of the animals’ faces and understated voice performances continually clashed with the script’s high drama and low wisecracks, and the clunky weight and textures aping nature documentary style drained all oomph and pizazz from the musical numbers. Most everything that’s bad about Mufasa carries over from those original sins. That Jenkins—and usual collaborators like production designer Mark Friedberg, editor Joi McMillon, and cinematographer James Laxton, who are also bending the technology to their will as much as animatedly possible given the corporate constraints—gets so much thematic personality and stylistic touches through the sheer tonnage of mandated CG falseness proves he’s one of the strongest directors working today.

He does what he can to bring more personality into the animals’ expressions—and there’s some real progress there. The cubs are pretty cute. They actually emote this time, and the musical numbers have a better bounce and color—though songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda is operating at about half his usual wit and catchiness. (That’s still considerably more than one could say for songs he didn’t write in Moana 2.) At least the movie’s telling a new story. Monkey Rafiki tells it like a legend to Simba’s daughter Kiara, the name a nice nod to the original hand-drawn Lion King 2. Here’s how Mufasa became the Lion King, and how his brother Scar became a scheming outcast, and how he met Sarabi, the lioness with whom he’d have Simba. It’s sometimes moving, sometimes boring, how it reflects the original with a story of a lost cub wandering in the wilderness and a villainous lion hoping to take control of the pride lands. If it weren’t for the Jenkins touches enlivening the lion drama and generational echoes, it’d be pretty flat. It still is sometimes, as it trudges through the dutiful, schematic plotting of Jeff Nathanson’s screenplay. But then there’s that extra tincture of soulfulness in the performances, a little more life in the staging of the animation. It’s not good, exactly, but it’s compelling to see it wrestle between its disparate elements, from relatively serious, engaged emotions to dull cliche. It’s a collision of intent between the earnest and the frivolous. (Consequently, Timon and Pumba’s more self-aware comic relief has never been more discordant, with references to Disney lawyers and the Broadway show.) As is, it’s an intriguing movie fighting valiantly to rise above the mandated mediocrities.