The Lion King: A Comparison Between Old and New

The Lion King is one of Disney’s highest grossing animated movies, and from what I can tell, one of their most popular ones. People love The Lion King. It was a part of so many peoples’ childhoods. It’s not really any surprise then that Disney decided to remake the movie

Because there was such a large time gap between the two movies, I think it’s interesting to compare them. Of course, I will just be giving my own opinions about the movies, so feel free to disagree with what I say about them.

Firstly, I’d like to compare the biggest difference between the movies: the animation. The original version was made with 2D animation; however the newer version was made with 3D animation. The new movie (2019) came out many years after the original (1994) so needless to say there’s been huge progress in animation technology between them.

What Disney did here seems to be part of a bigger project of remaking several old 2D animated movies into 3D animated movies, live-action movies, or movies that include a combination of both. Other examples of remade movies include The Jungle Book (2016), Dumbo (2019), and Aladdin (2019).

When I first started watching The Lion King’s shiny new remake, I was amazed at how realistic the 3D animation looked. It was so close to being the same as real life! The quality was super high. The environments looked gorgeous, and the animals looked incredible. It’s astounding that animation technology has come so far.

However, despite the quality of the animation, something is missing compared to the original movie. It seems that because the goal of the animators was to get as close to realism as the story allowed, they decided to animate the lions (the main characters) in a ‘realistic’ way. This meant that even though the lions were talking and expressing strong emotions, their faces barely moved. This felt really weird to me. Scenes that were really emotional in the original movie seemed lacking in the newer version because even though the voices were emotional, the characters’ faces were not, so there was a big disconnection there.

The original version was less realistic for sure, but more creative and interesting if you ask me. Besides, it’s an animated movie. It doesn’t have to be realistic in order to get its message across.

The story remained almost exactly the same. There weren’t any major changes in the plot or how the message and theme of the movie was delivered. There were changes in the characters’ dialogue, but nothing super note-worthy.

If you’ve ever seen a classic Disney animated movie, you know that they love to put songs in there to express the characters’ emotions at that point of the story. Most of the songs were the same in the new version, just with different singers and a remade music track. I think whether the remade songs are better or not is up to opinion. However, there was one song (‘Be Prepared’ sung by Scar, the villain of the movie) that they made much shorter and much less catchy. It barely even felt like a song compared to the original, so I for one was pretty disappointed with that, especially because it was my favourite song from the original.

Overall, I much prefer the original Lion King. The expressive 2D style seems superior to me, even though animation technology has advanced so much. Perhaps it is not the quality of the animation that counts, but rather the style and delivery of the animation. That being said, the 2019 version has left me impressed at how realistic 3D animated movies can be nowadays.

Thomas

Vocabulary
remake (verb) – to make a new version of something that has already been made before
time gap (compound noun) – an amount of time separating two things
astounding (adjective) – amazing; surprisingly impressive
realism (noun) – how real something is or looks
note-worthy (adjective) – interesting; particularly different or worth remembering