The writing here is quite pedestrian, regurgitating been-there-felt-that thoughts. This kind of ingenuity though is otherwise missing from this movie. There are some brilliant points of view shots snaking through trees and vast-lands, especially during tense chase sequences, capturing both dread and exhilaration. This bit is filmed from far, making it look as if the cub is walking on a huge trail of paper-thin sand, about to fall any minute. Or take another scene, where a fearful, grieving Simba is walking alone in a desert. (No live animals were filmed for the movie much of it was shot on a blue screen stage in Los Angeles.)Īlso read: A Booming International Movie Market Is Transforming Hollywood Vidyarthi’s voice is riveting here, and so is the ‘virtual cinematography’ – a blend of motion capture and VR technology. Consider, for instance, the scene where Scar, jumping from one cliff to the other, is both threatening the hyenas and detailing his plans of murdering Mufasa and Simba. Favreau (who also directed the much-loved The Jungle Book) doesn’t shy away from the grand, and sometimes the results are bewitching. Some films are about the story told The Lion King’s dubbed version – revelling in cultural segregation – is about a story spoken.įirst centred on a poignant father-son bond, and later becoming a coming-of-age story, The Lion King sits on a rich material of mainstream melodrama. Now what kind of Hindi do these animals speak? A slightly upgraded version of ‘Bandra Bihari’ (as evidenced in last week’s Super 30). Cut to: the film’s villains, a pack of hyenas, living in the elephants’ graveyard – a bleak, desolate land, populated by ominous rocks and molten lava – the jungle’s equivalent of a slum. Whether it’s Simba, Zazu, Mufasa, or even his evil younger brother Scar (Ashish Vidyarthi), they all speak in standard, grammatically correct Hindi (the lingua franca of most Bollywood films). If you came to this movie for Shah Rukh, you’ll stay for Aryan.īut listen to this movie more closely, and you’ll notice an unfortunate linguistic hierarchy.
Aryan’s voice, much like the young Simba, is filled with innocent curiosity and a child-like vibrancy. Not all is bleak here though: Mufasa’s son, Simba, voiced by Aryan Khan (Shah Rukh’s son), holds your attention. At one point, I almost thought he’d break into, “ Hum angrezon ke zamaane ke panchi hain.” (In a later scene, Simba’s mother even says, “ Keh do ki yeh jhooth hai!”) His majordomo, the hornbill Zazu, is voiced by Asrani who sounds as if he’s parodying himself.Īsrani’s style, very 1970s Bollywood, is too old and rehashed for this 2019 movie. We meet the king of the jungle, Mufasa (voiced by Shah Rukh Khan), who talks in a melodramatic sweep – a style almost outmoded in Hindi cinema now. The movie’s dubbed version, for some portion of its runtime, invents problems of its own. There’s nothing wrong with her rendition (it is sincere and heartfelt, complementing the visuals’ gravitas) but the song, in Hindi, sounds like a stylistic mismatch – a loveless marriage between a Western and an Indian idiom. It’s a wonderful celebration of the spirit of jungle – the scene pulsating like an animated sinusoidal wave – and its first false note, minutes later, comes when Usha Uthup sings in the background. There are giraffes, zebras, monkeys – and a herd of elephants walking slowly, majestically. Here, birds fly close to the rivulets, producing ripples meerkats stand on small rocks in rapt attention deers gambol in the savannahs. The opening sequence of The Lion King, directed by Jon Favreau, throws us right into the heart of an African jungle.
0 kommentar(er)
