Copycat: ‘The Lion King’ is a rehash, but it’s also air-conditioned | Movie review

There are those who say the new The Lion King reboot has no good reason to exist, but I disagree.

There are 99 reasons to see the movie this weekend. Meaning: It’s going to be 99 degrees on Friday. It’s going to be 99 on Saturday. It’s going to be 99 on Sunday. By then, surely, your kids will be on your raw superheated nerves, and since nobody is bringing the 1994 Lion King back to theaters en masse, your best option is to take them to the “new” copycat Lion King, give them a 60-ounce soda, and enjoy somebody else’s air-conditioning.

That is a reason for The Lion King to exist, and a good one, under the circumstances.

Also, normally I would complain about the two-hour run time (adding nearly 30 minutes to the animated original) but in this case the longer the better. In fact, the rebooted and supersized Aladdin is still around, so maybe you could book these two movies back-to-back and spend the hours between noon and 6 p.m. in the theater, and go home after it cools off.

Plus, the new King is competent, reasonably entertaining, faithful to the original, wholesome, sometimes even enjoyable. And while you couldn’t call it groundbreaking, it does raise some interesting questions about the nature and impact of the newfangled animation used to create the illusion that we’re watching real animals reenact the narrative from the traditionally animated original.

Like the title character in Dumbo or Abu the monkey in Aladdin, the critters here are computer-animated, created by using photo-realistic, state-of-the-art, sophisticated computer generated imaging. It’s possible that real animals were used in the modeling process (director Jon Favreau, who also directed the updated Jungle Book, is coy about the process involved), but what we see on screen would not be possible without cutting-edge CGI.

And the animals do look real, and it complicates the way we react to the story we’re seeing on screen.

To explain why, let’s back up a bit to Toy Story 4, a more traditional animated product that relies on the audience’s traditional understanding of the internal logic in play. We intuitively grasp that in the Toy Story universe, toys have a consciousness, and are as “real” as the human characters in the narrative.

TS4 toys with this notion cleverly — a child turns a plastic spork into a toy by giving it a face and feet and arms, and it instantly acquires the understanding that it exists, and starts to grapple (with the help of Woody) that is alive in the universe, and that it has a purpose.

In that sense, Toy Story is like the original Lion King, wherein the animals had the same anthropomorphic attributes as the toys. We accept that they can speak, and sing “Hakuna Matata,” We accept instantly that in the movie’s fanciful, colorful, and stylized realm, lions are the human equivalent of royalty and rule over the animal kingdom, and if a zebra is talking to a lion, and the lion isn’t eating the zebra, well, that’s part of the animated deal.

In the new Lion King, the photo-realism changes the equation. The more real a lion looks, the more we wonder why it isn’t eating the zebra. The movie makes a joke of this dissonance and incorporates it into the script as a means of explaining it away — in fact, it’s a central feature of the comic relief (actually the best part of the movie) provided by Seth Rogen and as Pumba the warthog and Billy Eichner as Timon the meerkat, who befriend outcast future king Simba (Donald Glover) while he’s in self-imposed exile.

For the same reason, by the way, he left town in the original. The reboot follows the same basic story line — Simba’s dad (James Earl Jones, who voiced Mufasa in the original as well) is murdered, evil uncle Scar (Chiwetel Ejiofor) causes Simba to feel responsible, and Simba leaves until he’s prodded by lioness Nala (Beyoncé Knowles-Carter) to return and reclaim the throne from the unholy Scar-hyena alliance.

Some of the old songs are there, but this is less of a full-on musical, and new music by Beyoncé plays over action montages as background music. Someday, in a more adventurous movie, the photo-realistic animal musical will be explored more creatively. A lion smoking a cigarette will sing “My Funny Valentine” in a cabaret.

This is not that movie, but who cares. It’s 99 freaking degrees.

The Lion King. Directed by Jon Favreau. Featuring the voices of Donald Glover, Seth Rogen, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Billy Eichner, Chiwetel Ejiofor, James Earl Jones. Distributed by Disney.

Running time: 1 hour, 58 mins.

Parents’ guide: PG (violence and peril, and some thematic elements)

Playing at: Area theaters.