Nothing They Make Will Touch 1994
The Lion King remake trailer is here, and it looks exactly like what it is: a technically impressive rendering of a film that didn’t need to be remade, produced by a studio that has discovered remakes are cheaper than risk. Disney reached into the vault, found the thing most likely to make people feel something, and fed it into the machine. Aladdin, The Jungle Book, Dumbo, Beauty and the Beast—they just grab whatever their fingers land on and run it through again.
I should be upfront about my bias. The 1994 The Lion King is my favorite Disney film—not in a casual "oh I liked that one" way, but in the way where I owned the soundtrack, the VHS, the video game, the picture books, the figurines, the audio drama on cassette. A former classmate named Katrin and I acted out scenes on the school bus every morning, mostly the exchanges between Simba and Scar because those had the best lines, and we both had them cold. That’s not nostalgia inflating something mediocre into something precious. The film actually is perfect. The Hans Zimmer score. The way the opening sequence builds to a full visual and musical crescendo before a single word of dialogue. A villain who is psychologically more interesting than the hero. The death scene, which landed differently at every age I watched it. The case holds structurally, emotionally, in every direction you push it.
The 2019 cast is difficult to argue with on paper: Donald Glover as Simba, Beyoncé as Nala, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Scar, John Oliver as Zazu. Ejiofor as Scar is genuinely interesting—he has the kind of controlled, elegant menace the role needs, and I’m curious what he does with it. But the trailer already confirms what I suspected: the photorealistic animals are going to be a problem. Animation earns its emotional resonance through exaggeration—a slightly too-large eye, an expression that couldn’t exist on a real lion’s face. That’s not a flaw; it’s the grammar of the form. When you strip it out in favor of documentary-grade rendering, you get animals that look real and feel nothing. The uncanny valley doesn’t run between human and robot. It runs between what looks alive and what merely moves.
I’ll go see it anyway. I’ll see all of them—every single Disney live-action-ish remake, apparently incapable of resistance even when I know exactly how it will go. But the 1994 film is still right where I left it, completely untouched by any of this. That’s the actual protection against the remake machine: the originals don’t go anywhere. They just sit there being what they always were, waiting for you to come back.