‘Mufasa’: A step up from ‘The Lion King,’ a step down for Barry Jenkins

In the 2019 movie, photorealism proved an immense constraint, resulting in hyper-realistic animals that could barely emote, and a plain visual style that never matched the grandeur of its music. Jenkins' approach is marginally more palatable. His characters' eyes and mouths are more elastic, though not always more stylized. A slight uncanniness remains, but at least you can tell they're going through something. The film is far from terrible—in fact, it's quite good at times!—but it often falls victim to the flaws inherent to its hybrid form, and to the demands of its corporate conception.

The story is mostly narrated from a present vantage, after the events of the first movie. The wise mandrill shaman Rafiki (John Kani) regales lion cub Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter)—the daughter of Nala and Simba—with the tale of how her grandfather Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) first came to be brothers with the villainous Scar (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), whose real name is Taka. It's an unusual framing device, if only because the movie keeps cutting back to it and losing energy in the process.

It's also made excruciating by the presence of meerkat-warthog comic duo Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen), whose ceaseless humor has exactly one mode: referential fourth wall-breaking à la Marvel's Deadpool, though their jokes don't make much sense (why would Disney's legal department threaten them for referencing the first Lion King?) These frequent interruptions become especially irksome when you consider how earnestly Jenkins approaches the central saga. Young cub Mufasa is separated from his parents by a deluge, and ends up being rescued by Taka, the playful prince of a local lion pride. Taka's mother, Queen Eshe (Thandiwe Newton) takes a liking to him, but his father, King Obasi (Lennie James) sticks to his guns and demands the tribe remain closed to outsiders. He’s an isolationist ruler, and his primary concern is protecting his royal lineage—a theme with which Jenkins attempts to wrestle—so the king separates Mufasa and Taka as best he can, though he rarely succeeds.

They’re two peas in a pod, and they also look rather alike, though this doesn’t seem intentional. It helps that when adult lions address the teenage Mufasa and Taka (or the two of them address each other), lines of dialogue sometimes begin with the names of each character. When they don't, it can be hard to tell them apart. This was never a problem in the animated movie, since Mufasa had golden fur and Scar was colored darker. Like in the Favreau remake, you can tell the “live action” designs are meant to have a similar distinction, but the delineation is seldom obvious, and can cause confusion in motion and in low-light scenes, when clarity matters most. It’s yet another result of chasing realism to a fault, which also means the lions can't really be anthropomorphized, or be imbued with meaningful physical characteristics that individualize them—like Scar's slimy saunter in the original. 

Thankfully, the movie's villains happen to be a pride of easily identifiable white lions, led by the fearsome Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen), whose lush mane offers him an air of royalty. There’s an awkwardness to the group in retrospect; their motivations are referenced in passing (rather than dramatized or depicted), and Kiros experiences an on-screen loss that doesn’t leave much of an impact. However, he reads as a moustache-twirling baddie whose main concern is usurping every other lion throne, making him the simplest and most delightful addition to Mufasa, though his role is surprisingly small. There are about 20 minutes during which the film becomes genuinely thrilling, starting with the introduction of these outsiders and their territory—an ashen landscape that feels right out of a nightmare. It departs from the otherwise drab interchangeability of most of the savanna setting.

Kiros’ signature musical track is almost great as well, and one of the only new songs that stands out. It’s a scheming toe-tapper that would be an earworm, if not for the lamest of lyrical crescendos. Its Shakespearean dialogue drips with delicious villainy, but culminates in the distinctly un-threatening "I'll make you go bye-bye" (Thanks, Lin-Manuel Miranda).

As Kiros chases Mufasa and Taka, the movie touches genuine greatness, between its sudden burst of visual momentum, and the introduction of emotionally charged dilemmas for both young lions, about their place in the pride. This pulsing interlude is visually clear—the magic of a medium shot!—and it breaks from the movie's usual, frenetic approach to movement, which otherwise blurs backgrounds into digital sludge that jitters with each lateral move. In most other scenes, the camera ends up so close to the characters’ shouts (which are even more pronounced in its 3-D presentation) that it becomes hard to track both space and emotion. It's a bizarre outcome, given the control the filmmakers presumably had over the relationships between these non-existent creatures and the frame.

Alas, the emotional turning point caused by Kiros’ arrival is a false promise. Much of the movie involves Kiros and his hench-lions tracking Mufasa and Taka from afar, with enough distance between them that they seldom interact. This is also excused by several characters possessing radar-like super senses, so the distance between any two lions seldom matters, as they head for a legendary promised land of which Mufasa’s parents once spoke. 

We have, of course, glimpsed this place before, both in the previous film and in the prologue for Mufasa. It's the Pride Lands over which Mufasa eventually rules, and while every character talks about it like some heavenly, ethereal realm, it really isn't much to look at. Even Pride Rock, the iconic cliff formation in the animated movie, is but a tiny bit of stone jutting out from larger hills. The need for verisimilitude keeps swallowing any possibility for formal flourish, for cinematic scale, or for awe and wonder, making Mufasa frustrating to watch. Anytime something fun or musically inspired threatens to unfold, the screen ends up looking drab, rendering the movie a mostly passive experience.

However, its strengths and failings do combine to form something instructive, if only by accident. When the movie works, it represents the best that one of these "live action" remakes can possibly be. At its helm is a soulful and genuinely visionary director, whose feature If Beale Street Could Talk and TV series The Underground Railroad reach transformative heights by plunging into the complicated depths of Black history, revealing vital truths about the United States. They don't just adapt the books on which they were based—by James Baldwin and Colson Whitehead, respectively—but they complement how each author saw the world, magnifying and enhancing their perspectives in the process. At the core of a text like The Lion King is the complicated notion of blood royalty being the Pride Lands’ savior, and Jenkins’ discomfort with the idea can occasionally be felt. After all, Mufasa is now an outsider, with Scar being framed as the one true king. But Jenkins is boxed-in by a story that has already happened, so he can only do so much to scrutinize the movie’s themes (or its plot; the soft spoken Taka becomes the ultimate villain so quickly that it causes whiplash).

As one might have feared, Jenkins ends up creatively restrained by a studio that values its properties as they are, so he likely couldn't color outside the lines even if he wanted to, and framing the original movie’s premise as something ugly—or at least, something worth thinking twice about—would likely have been a no-go. Blood royalty is nominally subverted, but only up to a point, and the possibility of saying something with this movie—saying anything really—hovers just outside its margins, as Mufasa slowly but surely proves why he’s the most worthy to sit atop the food chain as its lofty leader.

Jenkins usually creates magic on set—a real set, that is, with flesh and blood, and real environments. But when the best American cinema has to offer is placed in charge of a piece with this much oversight—and with the kind of technical specificity that leaves little room for an actor’s raw vulnerability—the result is sure to be lesser than his previous works. But the problem runs even deeper. Sure, a Disney paycheck might in theory fund his next five movies, and he hardly signed on to the project with a gun to his head—not a literal one, anyway. The filmmaker's recent Vulture profile also made it clear that the Amazon-funded Underground Railroad was a tumultuous process, and Mufasa represented both a break, and an opportunity to cede control. These are all simultaneously true, but is it not depressing that the lay of the land only provides two options as of now: the damaging indie grind, or the soulless studio conveyor belt?

Mufasa, if nothing else, ought to be a searing indictment of the choices great independent filmmakers are left with in the modern creative ecosystem. There are some joyful moments in the movie, but they are, at the end of the day, marred by its own existence, as a product churned out by a filmmaker who has created some of the most touching and radical works of American media this century. Now, he can add a "just okay" bit of turn-your-brain-off tedium to his résumé. Hakuna matata.