Disney's The Lion King Remake: 8 Things They Must Do To Nail It

2. Use The Most Important Songs (Or Elements Of Them)

The Lion King Disney.jpg
Disney

While it absolutely makes sense to axe a good portion of the music from the Lion King remake (like The Jungle Book), it's quite hard to imagine a Lion King movie without even a couple of those classic beats. In fact, if you take certain ones away, the film doesn't work quite as well - music and narrative are so tightly woven here that to lose some of the songs would only serve to lessen the movie's emotional effect.

Let's start with Circle Of Life - it literally shows the birth of our protagonist in one of the most uplifting moments in cinematic history. How else are Favreau and co. meant to reveal Simba in such a majestic, awe-inspiring fashion? Later on, Can You Feel The Love Tonight is essentially the song that turns Simba into a man, helping him move on from his traumatic past and accept his role as king. How else can all that be portrayed in such a cohesive, concise fashion?

And, crucially, the one thing that both these songs have in common is that the animals don't sing them (Timon and Pumbaa do hit a few bars of Can You Feel The Love Tonight, but they're easily cut out). This means that the remake can avoid the potentially bewildering feeling of watching a realistic animal belt out a pop-culture classic, and can instead play snippets of the most important songs over the top of the on-screen action. It's win/win.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!