Like so many prequels nowadays, ‘Mufasa: The Lion King’ suffers from an unhealthy obsession with explaining and contextualizing even the smallest detail of the film it complements, the remake ‘The Lion King’ (2018). And meanwhile, on the other hand, he does not bother to answer a crucial question: why did he decide Barry Jenkins acclaimed filmmaker, spend four years making a film – remember, a prequel to a remake – concocted by Disney’s financial department?
Given what has been seen, the only plausible explanation is the economic reason. Because, to explore the adolescence of his titular character, the ‘Oscar-winning’ director of ‘Moonlight’ (2017) orchestrates a completely formulaic plot adventure, full of generic messages about the value of tolerance and inclusion and illustrated with mediocre songs composed, perhaps during a creative crisis, by Broadway star Lin-Manuel Miranda.
True, here the photorealistic animation work is somewhat more convincing than in ‘The Lion King’, but we must not forget that the fantastic universe in which this saga takes place was originally conceived for hand-drawn animals with exaggerated features and emotions. , and not for a collection of hieratic and indistinguishable felines that would not look out of place in a National Geographic documentary.
Perhaps to compensate for the empty rigidity of its protagonists, Jenkins’ fake camera remains in constant, manic motion even in scenes that would have required calm and stillness. And in defense of this lack of motor control it can be said that perhaps it is the only thing capable of preventing the film – with its repetitive structure, its bland characters and its vulgar melodies – from killing its youngest viewers with boredom.