The existence of Mufasa: The Lion King, the Barry Jenkins-directed prequel to Jon Favreau’s 2019 photorealistic remake of The Lion King, raises an interesting set of questions. Some have been raised repeatedly throughout the history of cinema. Can artistry be smuggled into films made by corporate mandate? Can an artist even maintain their creative integrity when crafting a corporate product, or is their voice subsumed within the loss of their creative independence? Another is specific to this particular film: does the still-developing technology of “live-action animation,” a process that merges CGI animation with live-action filmmaking techniques (and which still doesn’t seem to have an agreed-upon term to describe it), have a viable future creatively or commercially?
Barry Jenkins’ artistry, fortunately, is on display throughout Mufasa, despite certain narrative intrusions that evince Disney’s heavy hand. As such, the film is an improvement on Favreau’s The Lion King, which in its dutiful retelling of the 1994 original with a commitment to aesthetic realism, earned unfavorable comparisons to nature documentaries and was deemed “soulless” by some. But despite their comparative accomplishments, Jenkins and Mufasa’s creative team are hamstrung by a filmmaking technique that, in comparison with the original Lion King’s vivid hand-drawn animation, severely limits the expressive capabilities of its leonine characters. The jury is still out on future commercial prospects of live-action animation, but artistically — Jenkins’ thoughtful and ambitious direction notwithstanding — Mufasa portends a dismal future for the still-evolving technique.
Mufasa tells the origin story of its titular character, the father of Lion King protagonist Simba. In that film, he is a just king who, in an act of betrayal, is killed by his villainous brother Scar. In Jeff Nathanson’s well-crafted, though occasionally cluttered screenplay, Mufasa (voiced as a cub by Braelyn and Brielle Rankins and as an adolescent lion by Aaron Pierre) is revealed to be an orphan separated from his parents in a flood, and taken in by a different pride at the urging of its queen, Eshe (Thandiwe Newton), and her cub, Taka (Theo Somolu as a cub, Kelvin Harrison Jr. as an adolescent) who found him adrift in a river and saved him from hungry crocodiles. The pride’s king, Obasi (Lennie James), is averse to outsiders, and he demands that Mufasa be raised by the pride’s females while he grooms Taka to be king. The adoptive brothers receive opposing lessons in leadership from Eshe and Obasi: Eshe teaches Mufasa to attune his senses to his environment and provide for his pride in the hunt, while Obasi teaches Taka to hold onto power by avoiding danger and shunting responsibility onto others. The fruits of these lessons come to bear when Mufasa and Taka are later called upon to fight the Outsiders, a power-hungry pride of white lions who decimate their pride and swear vengeance against Mufasa for killing the king’s son.
The following act of the film, in which Mufasa and Taka embark on a journey to find a new home and escape the Outsiders, is where their characters solidify into the archetypes of virtuous leader and betraying brother (Taka, of course, becomes Scar), and also where familiar characters enter the frame. Nathanson’s script, gamely taking on such weighty themes as fraternal bonds and betrayal, the twinned scourges of xenophobia and authoritarianism, and the perils and opportunities of being an outsider, is a worthy match for The Lion King’s canny reinterpretation of Hamlet. The narrative falters, though, in its framing device centered on Simba’s daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter), which uselessly interpolates the popular comic-relief characters Timon and Pumbaa (Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen) without adding anything to the core narrative. The film’s songs, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, are also a problem — their mid-tempo tunefulness does not even approach the showstopping power-pop of Elton John’s songs for The Lion King, and their often simplistic lyrics similarly pale in comparison to the unassuming complexity of Tim Rice’s.
Jenkins’ treatment of this story, though he cannot rescue it from middling songs and segments that read as obvious IP management, is alternately sweeping and meditative. Working with director of photographer James Laxton, he glides over and swoops through vast yet impeccably detailed digitally rendered landscapes, and suggests Mufasa’s developing interiority through a series of evocative flashbacks seamlessly edited by Joi McMillon. Jenkins stretches the film’s aesthetics beyond the realm of realism, including a beautifully conceived fantasy sequence early in the film wherein wildflowers spontaneously bloom over a drought-stricken savanna. Even in “realistic” scenes, Jenkins creates a sense of mystic awe — submergence in water is a prominent motif, beginning with the catastrophic flood at the film’s opening, and Jenkins evokes both fear and wonder in the turbulent rivers and pools that Mufasa repeatedly finds himself gazing into and swimming through.
Jenkins also deploys a familiar move numerous times over the course of the film: a character stares down the camera, meeting the audience’s gaze. Here, it becomes apparent that Jenkins’ formidable abilities cannot fully rescue Mufasa from the method used to make it. In films with human actors, the Jenkins gaze can be disarming, confrontational, and intimate at once; it involves the audience directly with the onscreen characters’ experience. The same effect cannot be achieved with a computer-generated lion — the gap between the attempt to represent reality and the animal’s obvious artifice is simply too apparent. It’s near impossible to mistake one for an actual lion, yet when they make human-like facial expressions or when actors’ voices emanate from their mouths, they are still realistic enough that it reads as stilted and awkward. The problem is so acute that every time Jenkins and Laxton train the camera on an animal’s face, one might wish they’d pan away to a wide shot of a landscape instead. In a narrative film which relies on audience members to emotionally identify with its characters, this is a fatal blow to its ultimate artistic success. For now, the technology of live-action animation remains plunged too deep in the uncanny valley to ever meet the audience face-to-face.
In its failures, Mufasa makes an inadvertent case for hand-drawn animation. The technology used for Mufasa is inarguably advanced, and the craftsmanship and artistry the creative team delivers is, with a few exceptions, impeccable. Yet despite the medium’s benefits, chief among them its allowance for directors like Jenkins to use traditional live-action filming techniques (detailed comprehensively in a recent interview with Jenkins by Matt Zoller Seitz), its limitations create an unbridgeable gap between film and audience. Whatever name one might use for it, the technique known as live-action animation may simply not be conducive to narrative cinema. The original Lion King, with its bold colors, expressive characters, and boundless aesthetic imagination, immerses its viewers through the very artifice inherent to the medium. Mufasa, because of its own medium’s misbegotten aspiration for reality, never lets its audience forget that they are watching a simulacrum.
DIRECTOR: Barry Jenkins; CAST: Aaron Pierre, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Tiffany Boone, Mads Mikkelsen, Thandiwe Newton; DISTRIBUTOR: Walt Disney Pictures; IN THEATERS: December 20; RUNTIME: 2 hr.
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