Mufasa: The Lion King is a catastrophic waste of director Barry Jenkins
Share:
The Oscar-winner behind ‘Moonlight’ and ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ can barely be found in this dreary and anonymous bit of franchise mining. Disney, it seems, is at least open to feedback. While the 2019 version of The Lion King may have been a hit, critics and audiences alike expressed an aversion to the uncanny inexpressiveness of its photorealistic, computer-animated felidae. And so, in its prequel, the lions have all had melted plastic grins slapped across their mouths. Some may prefer this. Personally, it frightened me on a primordial level, as if one of my old rainbow-splattered Lisa Frank pocket portfolios from the Nineties had gained sentience.
The sell here is both the promise of jacked-up anthropomorphism, and the talents of Oscar-winner Barry Jenkins, director of the miraculous Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). The news that he’d direct Mufasa: The Lion King sparked a minor controversy. Could he really turn what, on paper, seemed like arbitrary franchise mining into something extraordinary?.
Unfortunately, finding the Jenkins in Mufasa is like putting a blindfold on in the Louvre and trying to feel your way to the Mona Lisa. Here and there, we can find the faint outline of his genius: a tight closeup on a character’s face, confronting the audience with the essence of their animalhood; a protracted take, in which the camera bobs and weaves between dry grasses; shots that simulate what it might look like if you attached a GoPro to a lion cub’s forehead. But, ultimately, Mufasa is yet another damning case study of the fragility of the artist’s voice in the modern studio machine. Is there anything Jenkins could have realistically done to tip the scales on what a dreary, formless piece of storytelling this is?.
