With the release of “Mufasa: The Lion King” Disney adds onto the iconic Lion King franchise with the story of the Simbas father and the original lion king, Mufasa. While another prequel probably wasn’t the thing viewers hoped for, the movie’s incredible animation, breathtaking visuals and character storylines make the movie overall entertaining, even if the musical aspect is a little weak.
The story follows the life of Mufasa after he is separated from his family at a young age and rescued by another cub named Taka and taken in by Taka’s family. Later in their lives Mufasa and Taka are forced to leave their family and attempt to find the ideal land of Milele after their pride is attacked by another. The brothers then go on a great adventure where they team up with a lioness, Sarabi, a mandrill, Rafiki and a hornbill, Zazu.
The movie provides the backstory of Mufasa’s brother Taka who becomes Scar, the villain from the original “The Lion King” movie. While the story has a nice theme about finding a home and perseverance the plot sometimes feels dragged out and the movie moves a little slow.
The strongest aspect of the whole movie is the animation. I was constantly impressed with just how realistic the CGI animals were. The lions specifically are captured in a way that’s true to their real power and beauty, it almost feels like the viewer could reach out and touch them.
While the plot of the movie sometimes feels slow as the characters move through their journey with minimal conflict the scenery helps to move the plot along. The movie starts in a dry and arid desert, moves to grasslands and through snowy mountains and eventually to the grassy and lush landscape of Milele. Each place awes audiences with its beauty and realism. If it weren’t for these sweeping scenes the movie could have easily felt much longer than its run time of just about two hours.
Similarly to most Disney movies “Mufasa: The Lion King” is a movie-musical, however the musical aspect feels unimportant to the plot and fails to give additional insight into the characters. The movie only features eight original songs composed by Lin-Manual Miranda and the only one that seems to stand out is “I’ve Always Wanted a Brother,” simply because of its popularity on social media.
The main failure of the songs is that they don’t provide any character development or move the plot along. Everytime a song came on it just felt like an afterthought and slowed the movie down even more.
Overall, the newest edition to “The Lion King” franchise upholds the standard of other recent Disney movies by failing to impress but being entertaining nevertheless.
