Simba used to be a sleek upstart whose regal heritage was tempered by youthful insecurity now he’s just a lion who sounds like Donald Glover. Scar used to be a Shakespearian villain brimming with catty rage and closeted frustration now, he’s just a lion who sounds like Chiwetel Ejiofor. Most often, the animation is just bland in a way that saps the characters of their personalities. (Don’t ask how Zazu the hornbill can speak the Queen’s English even though his beak only moves up and down.)

Other times, the animals are constrained by the boundaries of verisimilitude forget the original’s Busby Berkeley-like choreography of “I Just Can’t Wait to be King” or the unbridled expressionism of “Hakuna Matata,” because all these hyper-realistic animals can do is walk around their drab environments and fall over each other. Sometimes, the graphics look so good that your brain struggles to make sense of why they don’t look better (Pride Rock, we learn, is located deep inside the uncanny valley). ‘Achilles’ Review: Iran’s Authoritarian Crackdown on Filmmakers Underscores a Melancholy Road Trip Drama Unlike the rest of the Disney’s latest rehashes, “The Lion King” isn’t live-action: Favreau, who previously inched towards this same technological asymptote with his playful update of “The Jungle Book” in 2016, has made a fully animated film working overtime to disguise itself as an episode of “Planet Earth.” This zombified digital clone of the studio’s first original cartoon feature is the Disney equivalent of Gus Van Sant’s “Psycho.” But “The Lion King” isn’t an echo, it’s a stain. With the possible exception of 2015’s “Cinderella,” which was touched with just enough magic to feel like a new wrinkle on an old fairy tale, all of Disney’s live-action rehashes have been faint echoes of their animated predecessors.

Instead, this soulless chimera of a film comes off as little more than a glorified tech demo from a greedy conglomerate - a well-rendered but creatively bankrupt self-portrait of a movie studio eating its own tail. Unfolding like the world’s longest and least convincing deepfake, Jon Favreau’s (almost) photorealistic remake of “ The Lion King” is meant to represent the next step in Disney’s circle of life.

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