Mufasa stares Disney’s “live-action” problem in the face

On December 23, 1935, exactly 89 years ago today, Walt Disney sent out a memo to Don Graham, head of the studio’s internal training and orientation classes. The letter outlines what Disney values in an animator, and what he values in animation. “The point must be made clear to the men that our study of the actual is not so that we may be able to accomplish the actual, but so that we may have a basis upon which to go into the fantastic, the unreal, the imaginative,” Disney wrote. “A good many of the men misinterpret the idea of studying the actual motion. They think it is our purpose merely to duplicate these things. This misconception should be cleared up for all.” This is a misconception that Walt Disney Pictures is investing everything into, one placed centerframe by Mufasa: The Lion King.

This is not only a Mufasa problem. There’s already been a whole string of these remakes, perhaps the least of which is Jon Favreau’s The Lion King. Before my screening, trailers for Snow White, How To Train Your Dragon, and Minecraft advertised worse “live-action” versions of things some of us have already somehow enjoyed over the previous decades. They all had the same sheen and narrative power of the commercial that preceded them, where Elphaba and Galinda from Wicked were color-coded smartphones. At least this latter effort had some creativity behind it, rather than relying on raw computational power.

That is the only power demonstrated by Mufasa. Disney’s memo placed an emphasis on what the audience feels when looking at an action, a cartoon, an interpretation. It’s not enough to effectively mimic something we recognize from life. There must be an emotional connection to it, reinforced through the process of interpretation. Mufasa has plenty of problems associated with its status as an IP-worshipping prequel: quoted visuals (a lot of claws-out hanging and falling) and dialogue (“the circle of life” and “everything the light touches” on repeat); origin stories for symbols viewed as holy only by company men (Rafiki’s staff, Scar’s scar, Pride Rock). But criticizing them feels a little pointless considering the CG elephant in the room. Mufasa’s essential flaw still lies in the prioritization of the photoreal. In the cartoon Lion King, Shakespearean drama played out on the savanna. In Mufasa, a lot of lions look at each other.

Mufasa director Barry Jenkins attempts to stick to his stylistic guns as much as possible, but as The A.V. Club’s Ignatiy Vishnevetsky noted, Jenkins is “more hamstrung by conventions of realism in this all-digital production than in his own live-action work; the moments of transcendence and presence that are his trademarks never come.” That’s because, well, “there are only so many ways that a realistic lion can move or emote.” And, to the credit of all the animators who toiled endlessly to make a nature documentary the long way around, the only thing that draws your eye in Mufasa is how much effort went into these movements.

The main characters—including Mufasa (Aaron Pierre), he-who-will-be-known-as-Scar (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), love interest Sarabi (Tiffany Boone), and villain Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen)—all have the same range of expression as a Zoobooks cover. That leaves us to observe their motion. Their perfectly rendered bodies move stiffly, like high-end action figures with so many points of articulation that the character is lost in the sheer glut of joints. We see the mechanics of every muscle movement under their fur, but nothing stirs in our hearts. 

Ironically, Jenkins’ formal go-tos actually make this problem worse. He relies on shallow focus close-ups of faces, centered and staring at the camera, the world around falling away in favor of the emotional experience shared between two people. Emphasis on “people.” When applying the same technique to the inherently limited looks a lion can deliver (even if Jenkins’ critters boast a bit more facial elasticity than Favreau’s), these moments confront us with the ever-present gap between image, sound, and emotion. It’s no longer that “we’re essentially just watching two animals stare blankly at each other,” as former A.V. Club Film Editor A.A. Dowd wrote about The Lion King. Now, they’re also staring blankly at us, as we are made unavoidably aware that these straining animal faces are incapable of anything but unfeeling fidelity, performances buried by pixels.

It’s worse than if it was simply footage of actual animals, à la Disney’s Homeward Bound, which would at least provide a blank enough slate onto which we could project our own emotions. Mufasa’s animals are straining to meet us in the middle, which pushes us further away. It’s uncanny when the film tries to associate a deliciously villainous performance from Mikkelsen or a sniveling turn from Harrison Jr. with these straight-faced lions, but it’s just as upsetting watching the result of a bunch of VFX experts trying to figure out what it would look like if an actual big cat could sing with Broadway vibrato. 

These self-defeating problems extend to larger moments in the narrative too. Scenes with clear goals lose all effectiveness because of how well the film accomplishes its tech demo task. A night scene—where proto-Scar and Mufasa, stalked by Sarabi, get confused and bonk into each other—has its clarity undermined by the fact that, especially in the dark, real lions all basically look the same. This also applies to a late moment where Mufasa reunites with his long-lost mother. A long tracking shot follows our hero as he navigates a dense crowd of animals, which eventually parts to reveal…some lion. Great. Is it Sarabi? One of the countless other lions featured in the film? It’s only after the lion says, effectively, “Hey Mufasa, I’m your long-lost mom,” that we understand. These scenes are built with the logical visual language of movies, building up either to physical comedy or an emotional hit, but are undermined by the fundamental premise of this enterprise: the dullest photograph is worth more than the most evocative painting.

Aside from Walt Disney himself, another filmmaker who predicted the problems of this technical misunderstanding (one reflective of how a tech bro thinks about value) was Jean Renoir. In conversation with filmmaker Jacques Rivette, he made this observation:

“Technical perfection can only create boredom, because it only reproduces nature. Imagine we are able to perfectly recreate a forest with cinema. We can see the thickness of the bark on the trees. The screen is even larger. It surrounds the audience. We’re really in the middle of the forest. We can touch the trees and smell the scent of the forest. There will be machines to emit the subtle odor of moss. What will happen? People will ride a scooter to a real forest and not to the movies. Why the hell would anyone go to a movie when they can have the real thing? So imitating nature can only lead to the death of an art form.”

This is an idea that’s arisen at the same time in the video game industry, as an overcommitment to photorealism and “immersion” has led to some gamers retreating to an ideological point best summed up by Twitter user @Jordan_Mallory: “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.” There’s symmetry to Disney spending millions on Barry Jenkins screwing around in a sophisticated, Serengeti-set version of Garry’s Mod. 

Disney once knew how to make joyous, vibrant, rubbery, funny animated movies. Now it only cranks out soulless sequels and lifeless life-like remakes. A studio that made its name with square blocks has fully invested in triangular holes. Maybe that memo needs to make the rounds again, but to the executives rather than the animators. In his instructive message, Walt Disney emphasized “contact with the audience,” which he defined as an association we make with what we see that comes from both our experience of reality and our history with our own imaginations. “When the action or the business loses its contact,” he wrote, “it becomes silly and meaningless to the audience.” Mufasa is silly and often meaningless, not despite but because of its aesthetic approach. In its grasping pursuit of the real, Disney has lost contact with those looking to escape it. Disney continues to rule over all the light touches, but more and more of its domain now lies in the uncanny valley where light can never reach.