The new Lion King live-action film is out in theaters now, and I knew I had to go see the film so I could give you my thoughts as an anime blogger and lifelong student of animation. I hope you enjoy reading my thoughts on the film!
The short answer is that, while some reviewers have been cool towards the new retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet with CGI lions — the film currently has only a 55% rating on Rotten Tomatoes — I thought it was a fine film, taking a fresh new approach to telling stories using realistic-looking animals that was entertaining and fun. The film preserves everything that was good about the original while adding a few improvements that tighten up the story and entertain with fresh jokes. While all the voice performances were great, I especially enjoyed John Oliver’s contribution as the royal majordomo Zazu. The film really managed to capture John’s natural awkwardness, and all the scenes he was in were great fun to watch.
One challenge when trying to form an opinion of a movie like the new Lion King is how to classify where it fits into the greater history of animation as an art form. Instead of comparing the photorealistic CGI to the 1994 original and debating which is better, I find it’s often useful to take a step back and look at each era of animation as a separate thing entirely. Some of the more important landmarks in animation have included…
- The arrival of cel animation, a huge innovation that allowed for individually painted frames to be prepared on sheets of cellulose which were photographed over a fixed background, which began in 1914.
- The first animation to feature sound, which was 1928’s Steamboat Willie, the debut appearance of Mickey Mouse.
- The “golden age” of Disney cel animation, such as The Jungle Book, the last film Walt worked on before his death.
- The first film to digitally paint images, The Little Mermaid, which was the beginning of the end of traditional cel animation. Japan’s animation industry would resist change for as long as they could, but eventually gave in and switched to digital coloring by 2010.
- The first 100% CGI film was Pixar’s Toy Story from 1995, which still maintained unrealistic “cartoonish” elements. As blockbusters like Frozen raked in billions, it became apparent that all Western animation would be CGI for the foreseeable future.
- Japan’s attempts to create a market for low-cost CGI “anime” which I believe should be called by an entirely different term such as “CGI anime” or “digital animation” to separate it from the more mainstream genre.
- The new era of “live-action” CGI animation, which features a totally new approach to realistically portraying animals in films such as the 2016 The Jungle Book photorealistic film (which I also thought was excellent) or the new Lion King. Whether this style of the film marks a new direction that will be repeated in the future, or merely an experiment that sticks around for a while then fade, remains to be seen.
But wait, isn’t The Lion King just a rip-off of the first anime I ever watched, Kimba the the White Lion? It’s complicated, but to my mind, there’s no form of art that doesn’t borrow from other forms of art. When Kimba creator Tezuka Osamu — the “God of Manga” who’s pretty much single-handedly responsible for crafting the modern manga and anime industries as we know them — went to create his works, he naturally copied the artistic approach of Disney in such films as Bambi, which obsessed about capturing the natural movement of animals as much as the new Lion King did. Even the vaunted “anime eyes” that are such a famous feature of the animation have clearly been repurposed stylistically from films like Bambi, if you look closely enough. Since every idea influences every other idea in an ongoing creative Circle of Life, I think the obvious inspiration Disney took with the original film are reasonable. And the official statement from Tezuka Pro stating that they consider the Lion King to be original work and not derived from their creation hopefully seals this argument for most fans.
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