I'm actually not sure how I feel about JEJ being back as Mufasa. It's an iconic role, but everyone else got recast, so why not him too. And I do think that you can hear aging in his voice. Mufasa is supposed to be a father of a newborn baby, not a grandpa. But who else to cast? No idea. So I also completely understand why he is back.
And it is. All of the songs from the original are featured except the one sung by Scar and the hyenas (I'm blanking on the name).
^"Be Prepared." I'm guessing they cut it because of the rather overt "Triumph of the Will" imagery in the original. Tony Todd or Keith David. Though they're both getting up there in age too.
My big concern with this is that they appear to be doing it as a shot for shot remake, and I watched the original so much as a kid that I practically have the whole thing memorized. If that is the case, then now that I've seen the character designs I can almost literally play the whole movie out in my mind.
Is that really a problem though? There have been plenty of remakes where the audience knew in advance how the plot was going to be, and the movie was still very enjoyable and good. Certainly, this new Lion King movie looks gorgeous and should be enjoyable to watch.
No! You can't improve on perfection! I'm biased since that was the first film I saw in theaters as a kid.
The new trailer has me planning to see this film, but my biggest peeve surrounding it remains the same: it is not a live-action film and yet people continue to refer to it as such. I also wish we knew for certain how many of the original film's songs are going to be used, as there have been conflicting reports on that front.
Oh, no, the sky is falling! Seriously, this is the weirdest complaint I've seen (not just from you, I've seen it from others, too). The level of aggravation I've seen on this point is just bizarre to me. There have been? All reports I've seen are all of the songs from the original minus the song Scar sang plus a new one written by Beyoncé.
The CG animals still look spectacular, but they're still not giving us a sense of what the dialogue scenes between them are like...
It bothers me because describing the film as being "live-action" is misleading to the point of being an outright lie given that it does not feature a single human actor and therefore does not meet the criteria of a live-action film. Back in February, a report surfaced stating that "Be Prepared" would in fact be part of the film, but, as you noted, there have also been reports that only "Circle of Life", "I Just Can't Wait To Be King", "Hakuna Matata", and "Can You Feel The Love Tonight" will be used.
I think it's merely a point of differentiation between their original animated movie and this new one. I mean, sure, it obviously isn't live-action, but from a marketing standpoint, it's much easier to market it that way. And I really doubt anyone would be mislead into thinking there are people in it when clearly the trailers show no people. FWIW, IMDB calls it a "CGI re-imagining", but it isn't a great marketable term. Disney is going with it because it matches their current slate of animated classic remakes.
Lion King is the first movie I ever saw in the theaters as a kid, and the only movie I ever saw twice in theaters, so I do have a real soft spot for it (even though I'd probably put the animated Beauty and The Beast, Disney's Hercules and Moana above it on my list of favorite animated Disney movies, I'd still call it a top 5 favorite Disney movie), and as such this remake is really not impressing me. All the animals are so realistic that they barely emote, which takes a lot away from moments like Scar telling Simba to run away when Simba's face has the same expression there that it has in every other scene in the trailer. This is definitely a library DVD watch for me. It might be an ok movie, but I'm honestly more interested in the Aladdin remake then this (although that will also not be a theater watch, at least it seems like it might do enough of its own thing to be interesting to me).
EW.com has posted a new fairly in depth article about the film. One thing I think is really cool is really cool is that film, they actually put the scenes together in a "VR volume" and then used that to actually place the cameras and "film" it like you would a live action movie. From what the article says, it sounds like this had never been done before, it treats it as major groundbreaking thing for these kinds of movies. That it pretty cool, and makes me wonder if there is a possibility of them eventually doing an VR version of the movie.