The Lion King

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: No
Watched With: Myself

Thought I'd check out the 3D re-release at the cinema, it's been many a year since I last checked it out.

This film really does stand apart from the rest of the golden era disney films. There's something a little more adult about the story and the way it's told than most other animations from the studio at the time. That might be one of the reasons I never really warmed to it much as a kid even though I watched constantly.

Viewing it again, what amazed me was the economy of storytelling. The story feels grand and yet it flies by under 90 minutes. It gives you just what you need to know and songs, montages and some refined key dialogue do the rest.

There's not that many songs either, I think 5 in total. It probably gets overlooked exactly how awesome Hans Zimmer's score that plays throughout the rest of the film is. It handles it's fair share of the storytelling too and many of the themes I remember from the movie aren't from the songs but from his score.

Visually it looks as great as ever. It's filled with great iconography and the 3D was really well done. I thought it may have been more along the lines of separating the 2D layers into 3D space but they's dimentionalised the 2D characters to a degree as well. Sometimes this works better than others. Characters that have a lot of flat colour areas in their design means there's no discernible detail to put depth to, so the colours look flat while the line work pops out in space on top of it. But for anybody not looking for it, it's probably not noticeable. So shots look incredible too, the one that stands out in my head was Scar leaping through the flames towards Simba at the climax.

Really great to watch this again. I'm just in awe of the storytelling and how it's seemingly boiled down to its bare essentials but still gets everything across. And I'm glad they didn't include the new song that's on the last DVD release.