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Moonlight in the Lion’s Den
Why Barry Jenkins gave up his improvisational shooting style to spend three years making Mufasa on a soundstage.
But a Disney-approved summary describes it as an epic journey built around the burgeoning friendship between the young, orphaned Mufasa and a lion named Taka, “heir to a royal bloodline.” It’s told in flashback to Simba and Nala’s daughter, Kiara, by the soothsaying mandrill Rafiki, with the meerkat Timon and the warthog Pumbaa goofing on the sidelines. But both Jenkins’s office and the workspace of his editor and close friend Joi McMillon were stocked with visual reference materials, including color reproductions of paintings by Sungi Mlengeya and Calida Rawles, photos by Jeremy Snell and Jalan and Jibril Durimel, and critic John Powers’s book about Wong Kar-wai, WKW. The scene was set in a virtual space created by Friedberg and his art department using Unreal Engine, a 3-D image-creation system that’s used in multiplayer video games like Fortnite that had been adapted by the special-effects company Industrial Light & Magic for use on effects-heavy films and TV series, including the 2019 Lion King, TheMandalorian, and Westworld.
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