‘Mufasa’ Review: Be Prepared (For a Disappointing Prequel)

Mufasa: The Lion King suffers from an acute case of prequelitis, a cinematic malady in which a film inspired by and set before a massive blockbuster feels an irresistible compulsion to explain every single aspect of its predecessor — not just the important characters and story points, but superfluous details that no one cared about in the first place. Filling in Mufasa’s tortured history before The Lion King could potentially be interesting. But did anyone really wonder where Rafiki got his cane? Or how they met Zazu the bird? Or why Pride Rock looks the way it does? Why does a rock need a backstory?

While Mufasa dwells on these sorts of irrelevant details, its larger questions go unanswered. Most fundamentally: Why did Barry Jenkins, one of our greatest directors, decide to make a prequel to Jon Favreau’s “live-action” Lion King, which featured eerily realistic but frozen-faced animals? Whatever his reasons, they’re not apparent in the finished movie. I find it hard to believe anyone could look at Mufasa sans credits or context and identify it as “A Barry Jenkins Film.” It is just another cog in the Disney live-action (or “live-action”) remake machine, and not particularly engaging one at that.

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A frame story set after the events of The Lion King sets up the main plot as a feature-length flashback. While Nala (Beyoncé) gives birth to her second cub with Simba (Donald Glover), wise mandrill Rafiki (John Kani) and second bananas Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen) watch over their daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter).

When Kiara gets scared by a nasty thunderstorm, Rafiki tells her a story as a distraction. From there, Don’t Tell Mom, the Babysitter’s a Meerkat morphs into the origin of Kiara’s grandfather Mufasa, who was voiced by the late, great James Earl Jones in both prior big-screen Lion King features. (Mufasa begins with a dedication to Jones, who passed away in September at the age of 93.)

The young Mufasa (Aaron Pierre) was not born of royal blood. As a cub, he got separated from his parents in a terrible (and conveniently sudden) flood, then was rescued from drowning by another young lion; a prince named Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who is so eager for a brother that he helps Mufasa earn a place in his family over the objections of his stern father Obasi (Lennie James), who distrusts outsiders.

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When Taka’s home comes under attack from a group of white lions led by the power-hungry (and also the I-like-to-eat-other-animals kind of hungry) Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen, never more typecast), the brothers must set off together on a journey to the mythical land of Milele, a utopian paradise where all animals live in harmony. They’re joined along the way by a ragtag group of other outcasts, who must learn to work together before Kiros and his followers hunt them down.

If that plot sounds familiar, you might have already seen Disney’s other big fall 2024 movie, Moana 2, another animated musical about a band of misfits who have to figure out how to co-exist in order to defeat an overwhelming evil and reach a fabled location where they can possibly rebuild their crumbling society. Both movies also push the same vague message about accepting those who are different and building inclusive communities (minus the lions who, y’know, want to eat everyone).

Unfortunately, the two films share another thing in common: Forgettable songs that never come close to matching the musical heights of either Moana or The Lion King. Curiously, the big member of the first Moana’s creative team who skipped its sequel, songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda, instead wrote the songs for Mufasa. His work here, with the possible exception of the catchy “We Go Together,” sounds like discarded B-sides. The music is recognizably his, but not especially catchy or memorable, especially by the standards he set for himself in his previous work on Broadway or for Disney.

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At least the character animation in Jenkins’ Mufasa is a little better than in Favreau’s The Lion King, where the various members of the animal kingdom poured their hearts out in song while their fuzzy digital faces maintained the same placid, dead-eyed expression. This time, the characters’ looks match their voices and their emotions better. It’s clear when Taka is giddy with joy or seething with jealousy. You could put Mufasa on mute and have a reasonable idea of what the heroes and villains are feeling at any moment; something you really couldn’t say about The Lion King (2019).

Still, that doesn’t change the fundamental issue: That this fictional universe was designed to be inhabited by hand-drawn, highly stylized Disney characters with exaggerated emotions and gestures. When you populate it with quasi-realistic animals, they can’t do anything too obviously anthropomorphic, the way Disney animated heroes so often can and do in their classic films, lest you break the illusion.

Instead, the characters in Mufasa just walk around constantly, and Jenkins’ camera swoops and circles around them in this perpetual state of manic motion. The sheer amount of kinetic energy on display might keep young ones from getting too bored across Mufasa’s two-hour runtime, but it doesn’t fully disguise the incredibly monotonous structure of wandering around the uncanny valley on the way to Milele, with an occasional song or cat fight thrown in every couple of minutes.

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Turning Mufasa’s rise to power into its own movie makes sense, although doing it in this style, and with so much prequelitis about less-essential elements of The Lion King mythos, still seems like a strange choice to me. As does Jenkins’ involvement in general. Maybe the appeal of playing in that sandbox (and with Disney’s bottomless checkbook), was too hard for Jenkins to resist. Or maybe his work on Mufasa is one of the purest expressions of the true circle of life in Hollywood: You do one for them, then you do one for yourself. Either way, I’m confident the one he makes for himself next will be better than this.

Additional Thoughts:

-Beyoncé receives an “And Beyoncé Knowles-Carter” credit onscreen in the closing titles. If my math is correct, she has two lines of dialogue. Her character is in maybe four shots. (Not four scenes, four shots.) Surely no one has ever done less in a movie and received “And...” billing in the credits. What can you say? It’s good to be the queen.

RATING: 4/10