Review: 'Mufasa: The Lion King,' a prequel to a remake, is too busy maintaining the brand to tell a compelling story

It’s possible to return too many times to the same watering hole — as Disney does with “Mufasa: The Lion King,” a prequel to the 2019 computer-animated remake of the studio’s 1994 classic animated movie, a copy of a copy of a perfect original.

Director Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”) and screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (who wrote the 2019 remake) introduce Mufasa as a cub, swept away from his parents (voiced by Anika Noni Rose and Keith David) in a massive flood. A long way downstream, he is pulled from the water by another cub, Taka — who wants to bring his new friend into his pride. 

Taka’s mother, Eshe (voiced by Thandiwe Newton), likes this idea, but his father, Osabi (voiced by Lennie James), is opposed — because Mufasa is an outsider and therefore worthy of suspicion. Osabi allows Mufasa to be raised by Eshe with the female cubs, but he must stay away from Taka, who is being trained to become the next king of the pride.

A new group of interlopers, a nasty pride of white lions, arrives on the scene with the goal of vanquishing all the other prides and being in command “wherever the light touches,” to borrow a phrase from the original film. How villainous are these white lions? Their leader, Kiros, is voiced by the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen — that’s how villainous they are.

Eshe gets the adult Taka (voiced by Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and Mufasa (voiced by Aaron Pierre) away from Kiros’ attack on Osabi’s pride, and she makes Mufasa promise to protect his brother, who is the last of Osabi’s royal bloodline. But out in the wild, Mufasa’s innate courage and the skills he learned from Eshe — skills Taka and the other males in the pride never encountered — show him to be a more natural leader. 

When the brothers team up with a lioness, Sarabi (voiced by Tiffany Boone), the three find that working together is beneficial, as they follow a mystical mandrill, Rafiki (voiced by John Kane), to the legendary land of Milele. As the friendship among lions turns into a love triangle, Taka’s jealousy drives him to do something unthinkable.

This story — which borrows from “The Prince of Egypt,” “East of Eden” and a few other classics — is somewhat bolstered by a song score written by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The best songs are “Bye-Bye,” sung by the gravelly Mikkelsen when Kiros dispatches his prey, and “Tell Me It’s You,” a moving ballad sung by Pierre and Boone. 

Jenkins does what he can to generate some real emotion out of all this, including some “camera” movement that gives some of the action feel like a nature documentary. Jenkins, though, is restricted by both the technological demands of the computer-generated talking animals and the studio mentality that puts storytelling a distant second to corporate brand management. 

This is most telling in the movie’s framing story, in which Rafiki tells a cub, Kiara (voiced by 12-year-old Blue Ivy Carter), the story of Mufasa, her grandfather. These moments are notable, and not in a good way, for the wisecracks from the franchise’s comic relief, the meerkat Timon (voiced by Billy Eichner) and warthog Pumbaa (voiced by Seth Rogen) — which include winking references to Broadway version and the ‘90s ubiquity of the song “Hakuna Matata.”

(Blue Ivy Carter’s presence in her first movie role makes sense, considering her mom, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, returns to voice Nala, Mufasa’s future daughter-in-law. The fact that Beyoncé has exactly one line and still gets featured billing speaks to the power of the Bey-hive.)

“Mufasa: The Lion King” starts with a few seconds of audio from the original Mufasa, James Earl Jones, who died in September at age 93. Disney was smart to get the remembrance out of the way early, because this movie doesn’t need any reminders of when this franchise was really astonishing. 

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‘Mufasa: The Lion King’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, December 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action/violence, peril and some thematic elements. Running time: 120 minutes.