Random Roar: The King Has Returned?

 

The Lion King has always been a very important movie to me.  It spoke to me in ways that other movies did not, and opened my eyes to the realization that I might just be a furry.

My character is CW, a feral tiger who has intelligence, so he’s basically a talking animal in the same vein as The Lion King, Watership Down, Balto, The Jungle Book and any other intellectual property that has to do with animal characters that have a human level of intelligence.  The Lion King has basically helped me find ways to express and represent myself that I would probably not have been otherwise able to.  As you can imagine, this means I can be incredibly critical of anything Disney does to try to extend the universe.

I actually re-watched The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride in October and was not as harsh towards it as I was expecting.  I still found fault in some of the things the movie did, but it’s not hot garbage like some of Disney’s other sequels released at the time.

I’ve honestly been avoiding the 2019 remake and it’s been five years, but I’ve yet to watch it in its entirety.  Unfortunately, watching even one or two scenes of the CGI version is like nails on the chalkboard to me because of the changes to the script, many of which I assume are because many of the original actors in 1994 were trained in comedy and thus were able to improvise lines that often worked better than anything the writers could’ve come up with.  (Here’s a dirty secret of Hollywood: watch any number of compilations of best improvised lines on YouTube and you’ll notice that actors will wing it a lot more often than you’d think.  The iconic final spoken line before the end credits in Iron Man?  Robert Downey Jr. improvised it.)  I would assume the reason those jokes don’t make it back in the film is because they weren’t the writers’ jokes to bring back, and the new comedic actors had their own jokes to tell.

As you can see, I’m very opinionated when it comes to anything in the Lion King franchise, and now that the Mufasa: The Lion King trailer has been released…

Isn’t it a bit early to be writing this movie off?  We barely know anything about it, but apparently it’s going to be about Rafiki telling Kiara a story about Mufasa’s childhood (so basically, Babar: The Movie if you go back an extra generation).  I wish they didn’t need such a framing device, but as I said, it’s too early to say so.

There’s talk that the movie destroys the canon of the franchise.  Everyone claims that the trailer is saying Mufasa isn’t a royal cub, but the specific wording is that he was born without a drop of nobility in his blood (and we’re all assuming the statement is talking about Mufasa, but the way the trailer’s put together, it’s hard to argue it could be anyone else even though it’s very possible the trailer could be deliberately misleading us).  As far as I can tell, everything we know about the lineage of Mufasa came from material not broadcast in movies or on television, and this canon has been disregarded before when making Simba’s Pride, so I don’t see why people are so up in arms about it being disregarded again.  Any media company reserves the right to decide what, if any, supplementary material is canon.

Another criticism being leveled at the movie is that Kiara is being played, this time, by newcomer Blue Ivy-Carter, daughter of Beyonce, who voices Nala in the CG remakes.  Blue Ivy-Carter is being called a “nepo baby”, a derogatory term for the son or daughter of an actor being given acting jobs based more on the perception that they got the job due to their lineage than on whether or not they can actually do the job.  Nepotism can suck in certain professions, but when a man takes a job at his father’s restaurant, that’s not nepotism.  That’s called working the family business.  The big issue with nepo babies in acting is that people have no faith in the ability for the son or daughter of an actor to be any good at acting.  Sometimes they might not even want to act and are being forced into it, but there’s no indication that this is what’s happening here.

For all we know, Ivy-Carter might have wanted to act in a Lion King movie and is looking forward to taking up the family business, so to speak.  It’s entirely possible that the framing device with Kiara and Rafiki is there just so that Ivy-Carter can be in the movie.

At this point, since none of Ivy-Carter’s work is in the trailer, we don’t know how her acting debut is going to go.  Criticizing the movie for including her is premature at best and a completely bad faith criticism at worst.  If anything, I hope she doesn’t try to interact with Lion King fans at all.  We all saw what happened to Jake Lloyd after The Phantom Menace.

There’s also a common criticism that the CG looks worse in Mufasa than in The Lion King, but it looks fine to me, and I think people are just grasping for straws because they know their other criticisms are easily debunked or dismissed.

Believe you me, I will be first to criticize this movie if it turns out to be terrible.  But it’s a half a year too early to judge whether it’s good or not.  Let’s wait for a few more trailers and maybe even wait until December for the movie to actually come out.