Mufasa left Antoine more than perplexed by his use of photorealistic 3D animation. It deserved an editorial.
Although it may seem hard to believe, Mufasa : The Roi Lion has been on my mind since watching it at the cinema. Not that the film touched or fascinated me, since it was quite the opposite: I was surprised by my total absence of emotions, including with regard to the triggers nostalgia expected from a film that rocked my childhood.
This is also why I wanted to write this editorial in the first person. Even with the critical distance, I consider myself to be a very good audience, and I think it is quite easy for a film to draw me into its story. To be frank, I had little hope of being won over by Mufasa after Déborah's criticism, which seemed to me to be a logical continuation of my own opinion on The Lion King of 2019.
Total disappointment
However, the day before I returned to my family for the Christmas holidays, I wanted to see the prequel right away on the beautiful giant screen of the Grand Rex. No doubt part of me was hoping to capture a tiny percentage of childish magic before the holidays started, while another part was morbidly curious to see Barry Jenkins, the director of Moonlight et If Beale Street Could Talkgo astray on such a blockbuster, as one slows down in front of a road accident.
Except that at the moment, Mufasa didn't even manage to disappoint or annoy me so that I left the room furious. My feeling boiled down to polite boredom, which I quickly put down to the high-sounding codes of the nostalgic prequel (how did Scar become Scar? How did Lions Rock become Lions Rock?) and of the atrocious rhythmic management of a second act which drags its legs – ironic for animals in the middle of a journey.
But the worst is that The film has never managed to amaze me for the technological showcase that it is. Although I am far from being an expert in the field of VFX, those who begin to know me on Ecran Large know that the subject fascinates me, and can even make me forgive in certain cases the narrative wanderings of a film.
Despite all the hatred I have for The Lion King of 2019 and its idiotic copy-paste approach, I also detect in rare moments Jon Favreau's thirst for technical experimentation, the only inclination of a project impossible to make interesting. Beyond its innovative approach to the virtual camera, the quality of the furs, the water and the lighting effects managed to captivate me in a few shots, especially with the 1994 reference in mind.
Basically, I expected at least the same thing from Mufasa. Even if it meant being out of phase with his story, I hoped that his visual mastery would leave me speechless with admiration towards his hundreds of little hands of concerned animators. To my own surprise, I was only speechless oncethe time for a shot whose complexity I dare not imagine, where Rafiki begins to act like an angel in one of the most beautiful CGI snows I have seen.
Lions vs Na’vis
If I launch into this editorial, it is not so much because of this lack of “wow” effect, which has necessarily lost its appeal since the first film. It is to question the strange feeling of unease that I experienced in front of Mufasa. Regularly, I felt the need to turn away from the screen for a few seconds, as if I were rejecting the images and their photorealism. The more the feature film screamed in my face that it wanted to be as close to reality as possible, the more its approach seemed false to me.
Of course, I could point out the obvious: the inextricable paradox of depicting “realistic” digital animals while forcing their anthropomorphization. It is clear that part of the problem lies in this impossible balance, especially when the reading of the film is little helped by editing which accumulates reverse shots on creatures that are not very expressive and are almost physically identical.
However, my “disgust” (for lack of a better term) far exceeded this uncanny valleywithout me being able to put my finger on it. Fortunately, in my family, returning home during the Christmas period often leads to the TV being turned on, and even in the middle of a board game session, I asked that we leave the broadcast on TF1 in the background. ofAvatar 2: The Way of Water.
Even though I began to know the film by heart (I must be at least on my tenth viewing), it didn't take long for me to be transported back to Pandora, and unlike MufasaI never question the truth of its world and its immersion. And that's when I realized what was wrong with the Disney prequel.
CG Ouch
AnchoringAvatarit is above all that of his camera. Even with his technological prowess, James Cameron has throughout his career ensured that his staging is logical in relation to the space he films, whether virtual or not. In the case ofAvatarits division is governed as if traditional cinema machinery were used on Pandora. We see hand-held cameras, some lively zooms, and even the spectacular tracking shots could come from helicopters or lenses strapped to the characters' ikrans.
In short, the space of the imaginary planet directly influences the image ofAvatar and its camera movements, whether it be its lighting effects, water and more generally the crossed elements. Without needing to pay attention to it, this sense of detail allows Cameron to highlight the textures of his universe, and the astonishing rendering of the animation.
This does not mean, however, that it is the only alternative for approaching digital cinema. Steven Spielberg (Tintin, Ready Player One), Robert Zemeckis (The Pole Express, Beowulf, Scrooge's Christmas Carol) ou encore Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity) impressed for their disproportionate sequence shots, emancipated from the limits of the tangible. The camera can accompany totally organized chaos in a crazy choreography, pass through the material, or see it pass from one element to another.
Beyond the pure thrill of the roller coaster, there is in this approach an ontological questioning of digital. When Spielberg showed a hallucinated ship transforming a dune into a wave in Tintinthe pixel was brought back to its nature as a basic unit, a microscopic Lego brick capable of creating everything, of changing shape.
We can also extend this comparison with The Lion King of 2019, which was basically just the equivalent of those Lego videos having fun recreating movie scenes, but with photorealistic 3D and a budget of more than $200 million. For his part, Mufasastuck between the achievements of its predecessor and its “original” story, no longer knows which foot to dance on, and ultimately remains stuck in a bastard in-between.
Without ever indulging in great twirling flights, his virtual camera does not have the realistic rigor of Cameron's either. As soon as the animals start running, the lens seems to float in the airin a movement too perfect and too programmed to embody its virtual world. This floating is permanent, incapable of attaching itself to the ground in these smooth tracking shots, where the bodies of the lions even serve in certain cases to “lock” the camera on their movements. On many occasions, I perceived the film image in the same way as a video game camera in a photo mode, sailing through space while being decorrelated from it.
This is perhaps the best parallel to make with the staging of Mufasa. The photo mode of a video game is not only a pause, but it is also the moment where we change point of view, where we leave our avatar, like an out-of-body experience. And it is this gap that creates a distance from the final result.
Pixel Depression
From the release of the first Avatar in 2009, certain media collected testimonies from spectators devastated with sadness as they left the room. The phenomenon was quickly nicknamed “post-Avatar depression syndrome”reflecting among part of the public the desire to never leave the enchanting universe of the film, and the realization of a gap between the world of fiction and the difficult return to our reality.
More than a simple fascination for an imagination that we cannot reach, the syndrome hammers home James Cameron's true approach. For those who made fun of the filmmaker's ecological naivety, Avatar was above all a step ahead, already reflecting this feeling of ecoanxiety that we now hear everywhere. We can even say thatAvatar 2 goes even further in this matter, definitively condemning the Earth through human consumerism. Cohabitation on Pandora is impossible, and war, so rejected by Na'vi philosophy, becomes a necessity to protect this corner of paradise.
What Cameron is saying implicitly is that utopia can only exist through the most advanced and precise technology. This is the tragedy of the photorealism of the saga. The beauty and tangibility of its biosphere and its textures are only the distorting mirror of our own planet, the one we are destroying. Through the perfect manufacture of a fantasized elsewhere, films reconnect us to our responsibilities, to the programmed and indifferent end of our “real” world, making digital cinema less an escape than a porous – although impassable – border with the real.
Here again, Mufasa responds with the antithesis in the worst possible way. Its desire for documentary realism makes its various biomes crossed by the characters these same sets of dreary CGI, photographed with a profound lack of contrast. But above all, he forces our world on the fictional imagination of Lion Kingyet devoid of humans.
Compared to what I said earlier, Barry Jenkins and his teams never asked the question of the value of the pixel. What do I represent with my virtual Lego bricks? What imagination will I translate with these impressive technologies? Where Avatar makes its digital perfection the projection of another perfection, itself very real and which can still be preserved, Mufasa makes this cinema of all possibilities into yet another surreal Disneyland parkprecisely reproducing real settings and animals to better disconnect them from their reality.
He forces his simulacrum by wanting us to forget his two sources: the original film and the real world, with an embarrassing unconsciousness. Paradoxically, the imprint of man on this world which is deprived of it ends up being felt in the smallest pixel. This is the rejection I felt in front of Mufasawhich I could compare to this moment when Neo no longer sees the facade of the Matrix, but the code that composes it.
In these pure digital lands, which humans cannot ultimately penetrate even if they are the creators, the explicit anticolonialism ofAvatar fades into The Lion King and its prequel. This immensity bathed in light is no longer the kingdom of animals. It is still that of men, creating flashy and meaningless palliatives, simple copy and paste of an immensity increasingly bathed in obscurity.
