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Should Every Disney Animated Classic get Remade, or Why I’m not Excited about The Lion King

Joshua Beck
8 min readJul 22, 2019

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Look, Simba, everything the light touches is gonna get remade.

I hate to write that title. I really do. The Lion King is a quintessential Disney film. While it is not my absolute favorite (that’s a three way tie between Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Emperor’s New Groove if we are strictly talking Disney animated flicks), it is up there. It is mandatory viewing for any kids I might one day have.

But I have to be honest, I’m not excited at all about the new live action movie. I was; this un-excitement didn’t really hit me until about a week ago. And I think what it was was that I realized there wasn’t anything new I wanted from that story.

The Circle of Life… of a Disney animated film.

Granted, the visuals look astounding. But the animated classic was no slouch; and being all animals, the new “live action” version isn’t really “live action” at all- we’re just replacing hand-drawn cartoon characters for realistic CG ones. And I love Jon Favreau’s work, and I’m sure he’s done an excellent job at bringing this story to “life.” But at best, I feel like this movie can appease me, rather than amaze me.

That probably has something to do with the subject matter; I mean, I was excited…

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Joshua Beck
Joshua Beck

Written by Joshua Beck

I am just clever enough to get into trouble…

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