The Lion King

The animals in Jon Favreau’s 2019 film are built to look real, so they cannot make faces, and the cost is paid scene by scene. Every moment the 1994 drawings carried with a raised eyebrow now falls to voice and score, while beats where a character reacts in silence do not register. Across most of these 118 minutes feeling travels through dialogue, not what you see. The one freedom such a literal remake keeps is camera placement, spent on a low, neutral, wildlife-documentary eye. The theatrical staging of the original comes apart, and passages built on geometry such as “Be Prepared” lose their shape. The liveliest stretch is where realism is dropped: Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner recorded together and were encouraged to improvise, so Timon and Pumbaa alone sound like they are in a room. The only live-action shot in the film is the sunrise at the start. The imagery was made on a platform MPC built with Magnopus and Unity Technologies around the Unity game engine; tripods, dollies, cranes and drones were physically operated, but every camera existed only in virtual space. There are 1,490 effects shots, and the film’s single Academy nomination, for visual effects, did not win. Go in curious about the virtual production method itself. Avoid it if you want scenes told through facial expression.