Director Jon Favreau has just left a scoring session for The Lion King with Hans Zimmer and an orchestra. It was for the stampede (yes, that stampede). And it will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the 1994 animated classic that, with Favreau’s footage playing in the background, it got a little emotional in that room.
“Working on it doesn’t make it any less emotional,” Favreau said.
And don’t even get him started on what it was like to listen to James Earl Jones record his lines as Mufasa.
Favreau and an army of people behind the scenes are putting the finishing touches on what might be this summer’s most anticipated release, one that’s been three years in the making with some of the biggest names in entertainment, including Beyoncé, and the expectations couldn’t be higher. None of the other major studios are even daring to go up against The Lion King when it opens July 19.
The animated film, which opened in June 1994 at the peak of the Disney animation renaissance, went on to become a critical hit.
Favreau wasn’t finished with his version of The Jungle Book when he started inquiring about plans for The Lion King. He’d learned so much about motion capture technology and had a team he knew how to collaborate with. He was ready to take it to the next level. So, he raised his hand for the big job.
“I kind of lobbied for it,” Favreau said.
The studio waited until The Jungle Book was out to give him the official word, but the 2016 movie which scored with both critics and audiences, turned out to be a pretty good audition. And he set to work prepping this “live-action” Lion King, which, it should be said isn’t live-action at all. It’s a combination of virtual reality and “keyframe animation,” which means that the animals are all animated by hand, “just like all the old animated movies,” Favreau explained.
Rather, it was more of a “black box with people wearing headsets and VR goggles.”
For the cast, which includes Donald Glover as Simba, Beyoncé as Nala, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Scar, Seth Rogen as Pumbaa and Billy Eichner as Timon, the process was pretty similar to what they would have done for a traditionally animated movie, but Favreau also filmed the actors during their voice recording sessions to help the animators. He knew it would look to weird to try to translate human expressions onto the cats’ faces so instead emotion is conveyed through body language (and a little mouth moving for the dialogue).
Anyone who’s seen the marketing thus far has no doubt recognized some familiar touchstones from the 1994 film. So familiar, in fact, that many started to wonder if this was going to be a shot-for-shot remake. Favreau said that isn’t the case.
“It diverges quite a bit,” he said. “It’s much longer than the original film. And part of what we’re doing here is to (give it more dimension) not just visually but both story wise and emotionally.”
With Beyoncé, for instance, he even changed the way he directed her and approached her animation after seeing her stage show and all the personas she channels for each song.
“Nala is a very powerful character who’s a warrior and also has a big heart and encapsulates a lot of different archetypes,” he said. “I wanted the way she was choreographed and with lions and the fight scenes to have a resonance with the power with which (Beyoncé) choreographs her stage show.”
And of course there’s the music, which is just as important as the images in conjuring up all the emotion and nostalgia associated with the original.