

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.
