The remake takes all the fanciful wonder of the original and replaces it with the stale crunch of a BBC documentary. Sure, the CG looks impressively realistic. But the original is often considered a pinnacle, a benchmark modern CG is still trying to achieve. There are ways animation can often tell a story more effectively than live-action, and CG is usually somewhere between live action and hand-drawn. The remake aims for the realistic end of the spectrum, only it's less charming than real animals. If you compare it to live-action films with real animals, like Babe, Lion King 2019 seems lifeless. There's neither the expressiveness you get with animation nor the spontaneity and fidgetiness you get with real animals - it looks accurate, but accurate for a soulless beast under a spell: predictable, mundane, overly smooth. It's like the animators' greatest fear was of accidentally surprising the audience. Heaven forbid any frame less than 99.9% predictable!

Expressive animal faces? Not realistic. Dancing? I mean, Pixar doesn't so probably nobody will miss it. Humor? Let's get rid of that. Voice acting? So long as we have some voice actors adults know are funny in real life, people won't notice they're not funny in the film.

I literally can't think of a single scene from the remake that was stronger than the original. The closest was the addition of Beyoncé's song, Spirit, which was nice, but overall the scene didn't move the story forward more powerfully than the original.