The Lion King – 2019
First, I’m just going to say that this movie was kind-of a one-trick pony, the trick being photo-realistic CGI animals. Second, it’s the same trick that was used in Disney’s 2016 film, The Jungle Book, and while the technological superiority may have been better, I couldn’t really see much difference between the quality or realism of the talking animals between this movie and that one. And third, the very nature of the film, hyper-realistic talking animals, as opposed to cartoon animated talking animals, triggers a disconnect in my brain that often destroys the very realism the filmmakers are trying to achieve.
When it comes down to it, I’ll admit, I didn’t really care for this movie, and that disconnect was a big part of my reasoning, though it wasn’t the only thing I didn’t like. But this isn’t a review of the movie, just its visual effects. Did the animals look real? Of course they did. They looked incredibly real. But again, this is nothing new. So what else did the visuals of the movie get right? Well, all the environments were digitally created, as well. In fact, I think I may have been more impressed with the realistic scenery than I was with the talking animals. Unfortunately, I don’t think that was the filmmakers’ intention.
One of the new technologies that was used to make this movie was actually pretty interesting. When making a modern movie, it is now pretty common practice to have roughly animated pre-visualizations made. It is almost like an animated story-board. But here, they went a step further, using virtual reality equipment. The incredibly detailed 3D environments were all created ahead of time. Then the director, John Favreau and his production crew would put on VR headsets and explore the virtual sets, setting up shots and camera angles. I’m guessing this eliminated the need for location scouting. And if they wanted anything in the environments changed in any way, it could be done fairly easily – remove that rock there, make the angle of that slope steeper, that kind of thing.
And there are other advantages to having a 100% CGI movie. For example, you never have to deal with actual nature. There are no delays due to bad weather, bad lighting, or uncooperative animals. In fact, the animals all behaved exactly as they were made to. Unfortunately, I think that was also a point against the realism of the film. The characters may have looked real, but they didn’t behave real. Talking aside, they didn’t always move like real animals. The perfect example is when they sang The Lion Sleeps Tonight. The fact that they were dancing made them look so fake. I tried to use my suspension of disbelief, to accept that animals in this world could dance and sing, but because the animals looked so real, I just had such a hard time believing the scene. So I suppose this might just be an inherent problem with CGI animals that look real but don’t behave real.