On their journey to the fabled land of Milele, the motley band of animal adventurers at the heart of Mufasa: The Lion King must cross what legend describes as the deepest canyon in all the land, a forbidding cleft that plunges deep into the earth. To make the movie, Barry Jenkins had to find his way through a terrain that is every bit as fraught, one littered with the bones of the filmmakers who have come before him: the uncanny valley. Although Disney likes to bill its recent animated blockbusters as "live action," their attempts at photorealist imagery have only served to underline how not-quite-live they are. Each whisker and leaf is immaculately rendered, and yet the whole falls just short of the mark, a triumph of technological taxidermy.
Five years on from Jon Favreau's digital remake of The Lion King, Mufasa appears to have achieved that last decisive leap. At least in IMAX 3D, which is how it was screened for press, the animal characters hum with the spark of life, and the savannah looks so real you could step through the screen. Although Favreau says he included a single shot of the real African landscape just to prove that audiences couldn't tell the difference, Jenkins shot, if that's even the right word, the entire movie on a virtual set, with animators in bodysuits acting out the first draft of the characters' movements. The result is, on a purely technical level, astonishing, as far from the six-fingered slop cranked out by A.I. image generators as a pencil sketch is from a Picasso.
Unfortunately, Mufasa is a musical about talking lions, which means that the quest for realism is a fundamentally misguided one. The movie's lions do indeed look like lions, as its trees look like trees, its waterfalls like waterfalls. But we have trees at home, even if they aren't populated by mandrill soothsayers. The strength of animation has never been in capturing reality but in departing from it, without the practical limitations of physical production. More than three decades after Jurassic Park, digital imagery is, at least on some levels, still catching up to the magic once worked with scale models and rubber masks. Replicating things that already exist seems like the poorest and most wasteful use of a technology that could potentially depict anything we can imagine. Hand James Cameron these tools, and you get giant space whales.
Real lions, of course, don't sing, and they don't make friends with sassy hornbills. And so Mufasa gets stuck in a different valley, not the one between computer-generated imagery and real life, but between style and substance. This is a story that requires fearsome beasts of prey to burst out in song, to have complicated feelings about the burdens of leadership and the balance between loyalty and love, and it's not well served by starting out in an aesthetic straitjacket. The rubbery expressiveness of traditional animation is replaced by the feeling of a nature documentary where the narrator's attempt to graft human emotions onto wild animals never quite feels like it takes.
The bulk of Mufasa takes place as a story within a story, recounted by the tribal elder Rafiki (voiced by John Kani) to the cub Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter), along with a peanut gallery composed of the warthog Pumbaa (Seth Rogen) and the meerkat Timon (Billy Eichner), which ought to give the movie a license to invent, or at least to play a little loose with the laws of nature. But this isn't just a story: It's myth, ponderous and self-consciously epic, drained of magic. In the frame story, Timon and Pumbaa crack metatextual jokes about The Lion King's Broadway staging, but when the scene shifts to the story of the young Mufasa (Aaron Pierre), the sense of playfulness whooshes out of the room, so much so that when the wisecracking Zazu (Preston Nyman) makes his entrance, you half expect a stone-faced lion will make a meal of him.
Swept away from his home by a freak flood, Mufasa uneasily joins a new pride whose leader, Obasi (Lennie James), regards him as an immediate threat. But Mufasa bonds quickly with Obasi's son, Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), and the two grow up as surrogate brothers, although Obasi insists that rather than guard the pride like the other males, Mufasa be raised to hunt, joining the females led by the pride's queen, Eshe (Thandiwe Newton). A threat to his new home, in the form of a pack of vicious, white-maned lions led by the fearsome Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), sends Mufasa and Taka running to safety, setting off on a story that grows less enticing the closer it gets to The Lion King. The screenplay, by Jeff Nathanson, who also wrote Favreau's movie, is largely built to answer questions that have been keeping no one up at night -- how did Scar get his scar, anyway? -- and to make space for a handful of mid-tier Lin-Manuel Miranda songs. Moana 2 suffers mightily from his absence, but Mufasa doesn't gain much from his inclusion.
Mufasa was almost inevitably destined to be Barry Jenkins' worst movie, and it is. But it's not a black mark on his record, just a blank space on the timeline. It suggests that if you put this massively powerful technology in the hands of a truly great filmmaker, one with an eye for composition and an exquisite understanding of human interaction, you can end up with a perfectly watchable movie, fundamentally unnecessary but in no way unpleasant. For a film built on sweeping notions of legacy, the future that Mufasa makes way for isn't one anyone will tell stories about.
