The Lion King (2019)

Okay just one question: Why should I care?

I went into the Loin King (2019) not expecting to like it. However, when I finished watching it I realized that my first poor impressions from what few trailers I had seen were, in fact, spot on.
If you were expecting anything else from me we clearly haven't meet yet, lets fix that. Hello, I'm the guy who likes art, good stylize-ation and can name a handful of the major principles of animation off the top of his head and ho boy do I have a rant for you.

 I've seen calendars with more evocative sunrises than the one that started the 2019 movie

The moment the movie started I knew my contempt was well justified. It started, like the original, with a sunrise. It may have been the tv I was watching it on but that sunrise did not feel like it earned the choir that backed it up. The original earned its choir backing with striking colors and movement rippling across the suns surface repenting the African heat. I could go on for a while about why this film doesn't look appealing but I can summarize the root of films failure with just one idea: expressiveness and the lack thereof.

I'm gonna getcha

 One of the most important aspects of animation and storytelling in general is communicating to your audience what your characters are feeling. The original Lion King used the tools of animation, such as body language, color, movement and facial expression. These  tools along with voice acting ensure that you can easily tell what the characters are feeling in each shot. (it also helped that they were Disney: kings of animation in the 90's.)

What Disney wanted us to think: Wow! look at those realistic eyes and detailed fur
What I thought: Ack! That unfamiliar non-human thing is close enough to bite my face off! Get it away!

The 2019 film on the other hand abandoned the expressive tools of animation in exchange for 'realism.' One of the worst side effects of this decision is that whenever the film zoomed in on a characters face I felt more uncomfortable than the five second pause when a children's cartoon character asks the audience what to do and then just blankly stares at the camera.

truly the epitome of a dangerous foreigner

Okay rant over lets move on to representation. Both the original and the 2019 movie have problems most notably in the movies' presentation of its villains. First off, Scar, as discussed in the US review only letting villains have disabilities is a general problem with films and the Lion King is no exception. As for the hyenas the 2019 remake tried to make the xenophobia parallels less obvious by casting black people for almost the entirety of the movies roles. The film also tried to justify their vilification by throwing in a plot point about the hyenas wanting to hunt endlessly leading to over hunting (this my have been in the original and I've forgotten). The original, however, had it worse with only a handful of black voice actors and most of them were cast as the hyenas.
In conclusion I don't recommend The Loin King (2019) for entertainment or for an example of good representation. I don't understand what Disney was thinking making this movie, wait scratch that I do know they were thinking: $! The thought process I don't  understand is the people who went to see this film in theaters.