Mufasa is a movie that I was really excited for, to me, the original Lion King is my favorite movie of all time. I love everything Lion King so I may be biased here in reviewing this movie. Personally I have no problem with the realistic look that they incorporated for the remake, so consequentially I don’t mind it here either. In fact, I feel like it does it better here and has the animals express themselves more through their faces more so adds more emotion to the scenes.
One thing that I did like was the way they had the movie shown through a framing device of Rafiki telling Kiara, Timon & Pumbaa the story of Mufasa. As much as I like this aspect, the surprisingly good voice acting in Blue Ivy’s debut, Billy Eichner/Seth Rogen continuing their brilliance… if the movie removed their parts and focused more on the actual Mufasa story then it would have been a betterment for the movie. I understand wanting to keep the runtime low for the kids, so in a movie titled Mufasa maybe that should have been 100% of the focus.
With that being said, because of the story telling device taking precedence, a lot of the beef of the story really does feel rushed, especially towards the end. A lot of the relationships just are not given enough time to generate true sparks that are worthy of the Lion King lure. The origin of Scar and his incorporation of the new ongoing family was really rushed and lazy. The voice acting is great when but when the story pacing speeds up, it sounds like they asked the voice actors to say as much things in a few minutes as they could. I feel like this is the downside of being part of a franchise of global conglomerate, it’s like the heads of the studio gave a checklist of things for this movie to hit and that focus was above all.
Honestly, depending on your feelings on the prior Lion King film, that will probably dictate your feelings towards Mufasa. The higher you probably will be on that movie, then that would translate to your feelings here. Lin Manuel-Mirandas music is good but probably isn’t the needle moving gear in the machine that is Mufasa that Disney hoped that it would be. (They should have just kept him on Moana 2 honestly)
Mufasa provides a fun & aesthetically pleasing origin for the previous Lion King but falls short on the grand story telling narrative that the original Lion King was able to produce.
🌟🌟🌟1/2
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