The Lion King Reboot: Be Prepared For Disappointment
All the worries.
Among many American audiences, the Disney corporation has a certain cachet when it comes to nostalgia. They made many of the films that informed or even defined our childhoods, and that brings with it an intrinsic pull. We all love reminiscing, which is why the Dinsey corporation has been reviving all of its old properties with a vengeance (e.g., Maleficent, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo, Aladdin, and now The Lion King). The Mickey Mouse corporation is going full speed ahead even though many of these old movies came from a white, and often reductive, lens.
The 2019 Lion King reboot doesn’t do much to challenge these original misconceptions. There isn’t an attempt to pull from a singular mythos or adjust the structural problems that came from the original. The reboot is taking a white story about Africa and updating it with modern sensibilities
Chances are you already know the story (that’s kind of the point), but for the uninitiated, it’s about a group of African animals living on a savanna called the Pride Lands. It centers on a young lion named Simba as he attempts to reclaim his late father Mufasa’s throne from his duplicitous uncle, Scar. Along the way, he makes friends with a meerkat and warthog pair named Timon and Pumbaa, as well as a de facto spiritual…
