Even Barry Jenkins Can Only Do So Much

Early in Mufasa: The Lion King, one shot quickly differentiates the new movie from the other CGI-heavy spins on classic Disney cartoons. Just before a cast of familiar characters begins recounting the titular patriarch’s origin story, his young granddaughter bounds toward the screen. For a moment, the photorealistic cub aims a warm, open look at the audience—and, instantly, we’re reminded that this is a Barry Jenkins production.

The prominence of this archetypal Jenkins image, in which a subject directly returns the viewer’s gaze, neatly captures the tension of the creative pairing that brought the film to life. Mufasa: The Lion King follows the original Lion King’s uncanny 2019 reworking, which had felt like an obvious nostalgia play—the continuation of an ongoing trend in which studios like Disney remake films from their archive and benefit by placing a familiar piece of intellectual property at the box office. So it was a surprising development when Jenkins, an auteur best known for weighty features such as Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, was announced as the director of a new prequel focused on protagonist Simba’s father.

In its most intriguing moments, Mufasa makes a clear case for how Jenkins has elevated the latest entry in the “Disney live-action-remake assembly line,” as my colleague David Sims called it. The new film follows the young Mufasa (voiced by Aaron Pierre) after an accidental separation from his parents, when a spirited cub named Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) saves the wayward lion’s life. The two come to see each other as brothers, despite Taka being a prince and his father insisting that Mufasa is nothing but an outsider who poses a threat to their family’s royal lineage—a suspicion that is partially justified when Mufasa does come to rule the land. (Eventually, Taka becomes Scar, the campy and conniving villain of The Lion King.)

The new film seems genuinely concerned with the interiority of its characters; the animals are far more believably expressive this time around, CGI and all. And with Jenkins at the helm, Mufasa: The Lion King is also a marked visual improvement from the 2019 Lion King’s pallid, nearly shot-for-shot re-creation of the 1994 animation. The director’s sweeping, dynamic scenes emphasize the drama of the animal showdowns with an eye toward how the natural world shapes their power struggles. Bright, sun-streaked pans across the savanna and idyllic visions of flower-covered fields contrast sharply with foreboding images of unfamiliar terrain.

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These images are particularly striking in IMAX. Every unexpected descent into a flooding canyon or grueling trek up an icy mountain emphasizes the lions’ vulnerability to the elements—or the vital importance of their connection to the land, a thread that mirrors Jenkins’s approach in his 2021 TV adaptation of The Underground Railroad. In some quieter scenes, Mufasa speaks about his environment with reverence and insight, and Mufasa draws artful observations about how outsiders can learn from their chosen family.

But still. Even with these high-culture flourishes, Mufasa never transcends its original calling as a glitzy Hollywood product. Consider the dual casting of Beyoncé as the lioness Nala, and Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter as Nala’s daughter Kiara—not so much a creative choice as a promotional opportunity. And unlike many other IP-driven franchise movies that well-regarded filmmakers have directed for major studios, Mufasa commits to hitting plenty of its narrative and emotional beats through original songs. As with the 2019 remake, nowhere is Mufasa’s hollow artistic center more obvious than during these musical sequences, which highlight the upper limits of CGI storytelling—bluntly, these animals just don’t look like they’re singing—and the fundamental unbelievability of Disney remakes that depend on it.

Mufasa’s singing scenes clearly lack the playfulness that made previous Disney soundtracks so memorable, in part because live-action production is simply less conducive to fantastical, dreamlike imagery than animation is. Without this spirit, the new film’s songs, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, struggle to match the verve and passion of not only the 1994 original, but also a pair of direct-to-video animated sequels released in 1998 and 2004. The 2019 Lion King, at least, offered the allure of Beyoncé’s imperfect but catchy companion album, but the music of Mufasa largely falls flat. It’s one thing to see an animated meerkat and warthog confidently belt a Swahili phrase to a surly cartoon lion cub, and hum along—but there’s nothing fun about watching real-looking animals sing. And three decades after “Hakuna Matata,” the new lyrics still sound ripped from a generic African proverb: “We Go Together,” one of the songs, opens with Rafiki singing, “If you wanna go fast, go alone … But if you wanna go far / We go together.”

In a recent Vulture interview, Jenkins conceded that all-digital filmmaking was a considerable challenge for him and longtime collaborators such as the cinematographer James Laxton, who has been integral to establishing the director’s signature aesthetic. After the grueling, on-location shoot for The Underground Railroad in Georgia, Jenkins said that working on Mufasa offered him the opportunity to realize a massive project within the stable, controlled environment of a virtual production studio. (Of course, it also came with a Disney-sized check.) But such a setting doesn’t lend itself to improvisation—a key feature of Jenkins’s typical filmmaking process, and one that can be at odds with the priorities of a studio interested in efficiency. “I want to work the other way again, where I want to physically get everything there,” the director said about his post-Mufasa plans. “How can these people, this light, this environment, come together to create an image that is moving, that is beautiful, that creates a text that is deep enough, dense enough, rich enough to speak to someone?”

Mufasa does speak, just in more of a whisper than a roar. By demystifying its protagonist, and extending some compassion to the much-maligned Scar, Jenkins accomplishes a fair bit with a film that could otherwise have been even less compelling. And this is a children’s movie, after all—for those old enough to sit through the film’s scarier bits, perhaps the animals’ expressiveness may help imbue some valuable takeaways about family and forgiveness. For the rest of us, though, the main lesson of Mufasa is a far less generative one: Even the most talented director can’t make someone else’s unoriginal idea shine.