It's a technical marvel. Using the same photorealistic CGI techniques as John Favreau's 2019 "live-action" remake of the classic 1994 Disney animation The Lion King, this origin story for Mufasa, father of Simba and the character whose death is the inciting incident in the original film, is a visually arresting spectacle. Directed by Barry Jenkins, the indie darling behind the triple Oscar-winning masterpiece Moonlight, and the similarly lauded If Beale Street Could Talk, Mufasa: The Lion King feels like a massive leap forward in terms of the rendering capacity of the computer animation software.
It captures not just the fur, but the play of muscle and sinew beneath it; not just water and ice but the minute refractions of light through a droplet or crystal. It even solves the lack of facial expression of the somewhat taxidermied-looking animals in the 2019 film. Gaze into the limpid, amber eyes of Mufasa (authoritatively voiced by Aaron Pierre, continuing his trajectory towards superstardom) and you can almost see his soul. Or you could, were it not for the fact that soul is one aspect that is conspicuously absent from this beautiful but cynical corporate exercise.
A lesson that bears repeating in this era of studio IP-juicing cash-in productions is that however beloved the source material, however many hundreds of millions you plough into a project (the budget for Musafa has not been made public but is estimated to be north of $200m), the resulting film will only ever be as good as its screenplay. Herein lies the problem. The script, by Jeff Nathanson, is schmaltzy, derivative and painfully earnest. It recycles themes and devices from the previous pictures. The attempts at humour, courtesy of returning characters Pumbaa the warthog (played by Seth Rogen) and Timon the meerkat (Billy Eichner), fall flatter than roadkill.
At the heart of the story is the conflicted bond between two brothers - a tale as old as time, with roots that go back to the Book of Genesis: Mane and Abel, if you will. This dynamic is complicated by the fact that Mufasa, who was separated by raging flood waters from his parents as a cub (Braelyn Rankins), and Taka, a lion princeling of noble birth, aren't related by blood. After Taka (voiced by Theo Somolu as a cub; Kelvin Harrison Jr as a young adult) rescues Mufasa from the jaws of crocodiles, Mufasa is adopted by Taka's pride and claimed by Taka as a brother. I Always Wanted a Brother - one of Lin-Manuel Miranda's catchier compositions for the film's soundtrack - cements the adoptive relationship.
Not everyone is welcoming. Taka's regal father, the king of his domain and leader of the pride, banishes Mufasa to live with the lionesses. There, Mufasa learns to hunt and track. Taka, meanwhile, enjoys the prestige of the male lions' inner circle, but learns little more than the art of taking daylong naps. When the pride is threatened by a rival clan of albino big cats, led by the vengeful Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen) and intent on the indiscriminate slaughter of all other lions, Taka quickly realises that he is ill-equipped to fight back. On the orders of his father, Taka flees the threat of the conquering pride to preserve the bloodline, with Mufasa as his trusty protector.
On their journey, which takes in so many dramatically varied terrains that it starts to feel like a promotional video showcasing the versatility of the CGI technology, they meet Sarabi (Tiffany Boone), a young lioness whose pride has also been decimated by Kiros and his band of big cat colonisers. Sarabi's presence sharpens the fraternal rivalry between Mufasa and Taka and heightens Taka's stewing feelings of inadequacy.
It's all competently put together, certainly. The action sequences - in particular, the early river rescue of Mufasa the cub - are slickly designed and showily dynamic. Perhaps the film could have benefited from losing a musical number or two, though the songs are Miranda-branded toe-tappers. But, in common with Nomadland film-maker Chloé Zhao's uneasy venture into the Marvel universe, Eternals, there's little sense of a distinctive directorial voice here. Ultimately, a more or less adequate Disney prequel is a waste of the gifts of a director who has poetry in his heart and other, more important stories to tell.