Film reviews: Mufasa: The Lion King | Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Mufasa: The Lion King | DISNEY

Mufasa: The Lion King (PG) ★★★★

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (U) ★★★★

Having directed the Oscar-winning Moonlight, the excellent James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk, and the TV adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Barry Jenkins turns his hand to Disney with Mufasa: The Lion King, delivering a surprisingly robust prequel to 2019’s photorealistic remake of the animated classic.

Telling the origins story of Simba’s father Mufasa and his precarious relationship with his embittered brother Scar, it’s a lively, compassionate, spectacularly rendered story of sibling rivalry, jealousy and prejudice that gives Jenkins some room to broaden the scope of the Lion King’s positive circle-of-life messaging to include a sly critique of colonialism. That’s if you want it. If you don’t, it works perfectly well as a family adventure film with a cache of new songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda and a spot of meta commentary from Pumba the warthog (Seth Rogen) and Timon the meerkat (Billy Eichner), both of whom repeatedly interrupt the action in a vain effort to get their ear-wormy Hakuna Matata song into the film.

Where the first film felt like a vaguely unnecessary update (save for the welcome diversification of the voice cast), this one benefits from having a new story to tell, with Mufasa (voiced by Rebel Ridge star Aaron Pierre) now a young roustabout lion cub who gets separated from his parents during a flood and is rescued by Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr), a cub from a different pride whose mother, Eshe (Thandiwe Newton), proceeds to take him him in. This displeases Taka’s kingly father, Obasi (Lenny James), who bangs on about protecting the bloodline, fears strays and warns Taka to be wary of his new, adopted sibling, dooming Taka in the process to a lifelong inferiority complex. Indeed, when a pride of fearsome white lions — led by the Mads Mikkelsen-voiced Kiro — move in on them, completely disregarding the balance of nature, Mufasa’s bravery in defending Taka’s mother sows the seeds for a future falling-out as they’re forced to embark on a journey to find a new homeland while their white-furred rivals plunder all before them.

It’s here where you can really detect Jenkins’ hand as a director. Although the visuals aren’t to be sniffed at, this kind of intensive digital filmmaking can be hard on auteurs used to working in more instinctive and intimate ways. But if it’s not always easy to detect Jenkins’ fingerprints on the shots, his ability to explore some pretty weighty and sophisticated themes with compassion and clarity in the midst of a Disney blockbuster makes it stand out.

BBC/Aardman

Speaking of creative fingerprints, Nick Park’s are there for all to see in Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, the first feature length adventure for the Aardman founder’s intrepid stop-motion duo since 2005’s The Curse of the Were Rabbit. The series has lost none of its appeal in the intervening years and, unlike Aardman’s belated Chicken Run sequel last year, it feels fresh as ever, even when paying homage to Martin Scorsese’s 33-year-old Cape Fear via embittered penguin Feathers McGraw doing prison bar pull-ups like De Niro’s Max Cady.

The titular revenge plot revolves around said penguin’s determination to get even with Wallace and Gromit for foiling his robbery of a rare diamond in The Wrong Trousers (this film is a direct sequel).

Intent on giving it a modern sheen, though, Park and co-director Merlin Crossingham weave this into a delightfully barmy story in which Wallace’s invention of an AI gnome called Norbot inadvertently causes a rift with the mistrustful Gromit and soon leads to a whole army of the things causing chaos in their sleepy Yorkshire town after Feathers McGraw hacks into Norbot (voiced with comic creepiness by Reece Shearsmith).

What follows is smart, funny, wonderfully idiosyncratic stuff, with animated action scenes to rival Mission: Impossible and the AI plot functioning as a timely and gently pointed reminder of the threat such generative tech poses to the creative endeavours that nourish the soul.

Mufasa: The Lion King is in cinemas from 20 December; Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is on select release in cinemas from 18 December and screens on Christmas Day on the BBC and BBC iPlayer.