My kids have been watching the original Lion King near daily after pre school. To mix things up we put this one on instead. It struggles to recapture the magic the original still has. However, that is a high bar to achieve.

It looks beautiful, the voice lines are great, and the music is nice. However, it looks too realistic to then apply dialogue to. It simply doesn't work and makes it a challenge to vibe with the movie. The dichotomy of extremely realistic looking animals talking like cartoon characters is too disruptive.

This makes me wonder if it was shown to a test audience at all. Or if it was just shown to the crew who worked on it, who would be reluctant to speak against it.

The only thing that truly works for this film is the opening song because there's no dialogue. Even the title card for the film name felt jarring not being in red.