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All the Technological Wizardry in the World Can’t Save Mufasa: The Lion King
Barry Jenkins’s prequel to the 2019 “live-action” remake of the 1994 Disney animated classic leaves much to be desired.
Watch the original Lion King, the hand-animated one, and you’ll find a wild, rousing epic that in 88 short minutes seems to glide effortlessly from high tragedy to gonzo surrealism to coming-of-age adventure to stirring revenge thriller, populated with colorful and fascinating characters and composed of sequences that have entered our common cultural vernacular. Unfortunately, also listening are the jocular warthog Pumbaa and his meerkat sidekick Timon (Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner), two characters who served as charming comic relief in the previous films but here indulge in a series of painfully unfunny bits that might make you question your sanity. But somehow, in this movie where only the most ignorant characters speak of such silly things as royal bloodlines, our hero has been gifted unique, maybe even supernatural powers of scent and sight and intuition to make it clear that, no, really, this guy is, in fact, a Chosen One.
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