Be it traditional animation or contemporary photorealistic digital/computer animation, what has worked for The Lion King is the “humanification” of animals. I am deliberately not using the word humanising here because, as we are well aware, it’s the animals who are at most times more humane than the brutes that the human race has become.
Humanification is to imply that what transpires on screen transcends the animal kingdom; it is what one associates with the world of women and men. Hence, something we can identify with closely.
There is a familiarity to the relationships, the clear divisions between the good and the bad individuals, the situations and emotions, with each character personifying a feeling.
The lion crown prince Simba’s jealous uncle Scar kills his father, King Mufasa. Burdened with the misplaced guilt of being the reason for his killing, Simba goes into exile in the company of Timon and Pumbaa, the meerkat and the warthog. But can the son of the king not be a king himself? He has to return to and reclaim his kingdom.
It’s the angst of the wronged brother Scar — about being a commoner and life having been unfair to him — that has dramatic potential before lapsing into the clichéd bad man portrayal. And, towering over everything else in the film is the father-son relationship.
Simba’s hero-worship of his dad Mufasa and their mutual love gives the film its emotional tug but the idea of the ruler and his successor also makes it a trifle antediluvian. The film does try to play down royalty by positing the king as a protector, the one who serves and gives instead of owns and takes. The country can’t belong to one person.
The 2019 version pretty much sticks to everything from the original. However, a larger reinterpretation of the lineage-inheritance trope — why does the son of a king have to take over from him — would have made it a little less out of joint in these times.
However, having said that, it’s also a trifle ironic that in India, the most looked forward to thing about the film’s Hindi version has been the fact that it’s Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan who has voiced Simba.
Well, the voice does have gravitas, flexibility and an ability to articulate trauma. In fact, the film hinges on the aural more than the visual magic. The animation at large makes it seem as though one is on a virtual safari into the jungle but the digital animal visages themselves remain a trifle flat, two dimensional, not half as vivid and layered as those in the original.
It’s the soundtrack and the star voices — both in the English and the Hindi versions — that bring things alive, specially in some throwaway light moments, like an affianced-betrothed wordplay or a hornbill versus woodpecker debate.
