In the lead-up to this film's release there was a semi-viral piece of marketing from one of the late-night TV shows. It was a side-by-side comparison of "Hakuna Matata," the 1994 animated version vs. the 2019 remake. It was shocking how much more appealing the original seemed. This... was not the point apparently.

When the movie began, my daughter groaned. She thought this was supposed to be a cartoon. For someone her age who pays such close attention to commercials/ads (it's troubling), I was shocked she didn't know what she was in for. This paragraph doesn't have much to do with the review, sorry.

How unnecessary and blatantly anti-creativity are these live-action remakes! I don't have much else to say! Disney could have just done a re-release of the original and still made bank at the box office (with zero production costs), right? Enough. It would be one thing if they built off the original characters/story and took it someplace new. But this pitch was essentially: It's Simba but also Childish Gambino, and all the animals are real but also fake. The songs are exactly the same only worse. Yuck. Yuck Yuck Yuck. 1,000 times Yuck.

In Noah Baumbach's The Meyerowitz Stories (2017), Dustin Hoffman's character is fond of saying "it's my protest, like McEnroe," referencing the tennis great's proclivity for protesting points during matches. My giving this a 2 is the equivalent of that. Because, in the end, my daughter did really enjoy it. She has no taste and no respect for originality; she's five.