Review: The Lion King 3D
Thrust that cub! Unfortunately there was no depth-of-field trickery here.
The Lion King 3D
Directed by: Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff
Starring: Voices of James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons, Matthew Broderick, Rowan Atkinson, Nathan Lane and more
Released by: Disney
Unlike next year’s looming 3D redux of Titanic, there’s no notable anniversary behind The Lion King’s short 3D return to cinemas. Perhaps Disney is double-dipping; The Lion King remains the company’s highest-grossing film of all time. Hell, it’s the world’s fifth-highest-grossing film of all time.
When I first saw it in 1994, I was a teenager who fancied myself tough to impress, but its self-consciously panoramic aesthetic and mythic narrative just blew me away, right from the spine-tingling opening scene when Simba the lion cub is thrust into that beam of light atop Pride Rock, all the animals bow, then the title card intrudes on this epic tableau with a weighty thunk.
It’s important to hold onto feelings like these when innumerable rewatchings, the subsequent advances in animation techniques and the inevitable pop-cultural in-jokes have rendered this film so familiar, even banal. The extent to which it cribs from the Osamu Tezuka anime Kimba the White Lion is so well known The Simpsons made fun of it. And don’t forget the notorious ‘subliminal’ word SEX (although this person seems to see sex everywhere in the film).
The Lion King is the last 2D animation to which I remember responding so powerfully, although I’ve since found the Toy Story cycle, WALL-E and Up wonderfully moving. Could the magic of the Circle of Life carry over to the Sphere of Life?
Yes and no. The first thing I noticed was how flat the animation looks. The shots are beautifully composed, and the African landscapes have an almost painterly impressionism, but there just isn’t the texture we’ve got used to seeing in CG animation.
The 3D treatment tries to make the characters more solid; the lions’ muzzles now protrude. But it’s more successful in superimpositions or moving shots, such as the sequences where Zazu the officious hornbill (Rowan Atkinson) is captured in flight.
The other problem with the post-production 3D is that it’s limited by the film’s original composition. I desperately wanted the lion cub to be thrust not merely into the air, but towards the audience. This just can’t happen, because Rafiki the wise mandrill (Robert Guillaume) originally thrust him sideways.
However, there is a very evocative sequence in which Simba (Matthew Broderick) chases Rafiki through the jungle to reach the spot where he famously sees a vision of his dead father Mufasa (James Earl Jones) in the sky. The 3D works here to create the dizzying, kinetic effect that we’re rushing through the undergrowth with Simba.
Scar (Jeremy Irons) plots to kill his young nephew Simba (Jonathan Taylor Thomas).
Of the film’s original elements, I liked the Tim Rice and Elton John songs least this time around. ‘Circle of Life’ still soundtracks one of the greatest opening sequences of all time, but the others just don’t stack up to the great Disney songs by the Sherman Brothers or Menken and Ashman. ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight?’ is a particular dog’s breakfast (hyena’s breakfast?), with portions sung by four different singers. On the other hand, I noticed afresh how great Hans Zimmer’s score is, giving the film’s tragic themes real power.
Time also offers a greater appreciation of the voice cast. Jeremy Irons, in particular, is wonderfully unctuous – his panto villain Scar seems to have a different vocal modulation for every line. And the banter between the comic characters is still laugh-out-loud funny, both between meerkat Timon (Nathan Lane) and warthog Pumbaa (Ernie Sabella) and between hyenas Shenzi (Whoopi Goldberg) and Banzai (Cheech Marin). It’s lovely to hear the whole cinema laughing too.
When you think about it, The Lion King‘s real brilliance is making us care about the dynastic struggles of anthropomorphic lions. But its central themes of an anointed son and a pretender to his rule, of exile and redemption, are universal, appearing in the Biblical story of Joseph, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the African epic of Sundiata. The Lion King doesn’t need an extra dimension to be this emotionally satisfying.
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I have never seen The Lion King. Ever.
I love the orignal film and like 3D , but converting the film to 3D must have been quite a chalange some things work and some dont, not all the 3D work in the film is perspective correct which makes it hard to view as your eyes hunt for a focal point in scene (most 3d film makers place the ‘object of focus” in each scene in sharp focus the rest in soft focus that object draws your focus naturaly , if this is not done and the whole scene is in focus the brain tryes to focus on many diffrent objects in scene like they would in the real world it simply cant do this with a stereoscopic 3D image on a flat screen. the film maker must do it for you.having proper focal depth of field makes natural easy to view 3D and is very hard to do when converting 2D animation where the focal depth is assumed to be viewed in 2D.
Mel – now’s your chance!