The upcoming live-action Disney movie Mufasa: The Lion King will be with us in under 2 weeks, and in a very interesting Vulture interview the director of the movie, Barry Jenkins, has implied that he won’t be returning to CGI filmmaking after finishing work on the live-action prequel.
When asked what he thinks about digital filmmaking, Jenkins told the interviewer, “It is not my thing”. He also added, “I want to work the other way again”.
For an Oscar-winning director (yes, ‘Moonlight’ won the Oscar, not ‘La La Land’), who injects so much style and personality into every scene of his movies, it must be strange to work on a movie where your characters seem to show no change in emotion whatsoever regardless of what’s happening around them.
One of the major criticisms of the live-action remake of The Lion King was that the live-action animals seemed a bit….lifeless, almost to a comical degree. The scene where (spoilers) Mufasa dies in front of his son ends up actually being quite funny, because Simba’s face remains pretty much the same throughout the harrowing ordeal.
Contrast the live-action The Lion King to the original animated movie from 1994 and it makes you wonder why Disney bothered with a live-action remake that sucked all the emotion out of the story. Oh yeh, $$$.
But at the same time, this is a very strange comment for Jenkins to make just days before the Mufasa movie is hitting cinemas.
What can we take from this? Well, Jenkins might not be working for Disney again.
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