by YFWE » April 13th, 2009, 6:41 pm
I enjoyed the movie, and I think this is because of my unheightened expectations going in.
I didn't expect a Lion King 3 going in, obviously. I knew what it was going to be about and took it as such. I thorougly enjoyed Timon and Pumbaa's comic relief in the first two movies, so I knew that, in some capacity, a movie centered around their misadventures would be highly entertaining to me. I knew it wouldn't bring the entire animation world to its knees, and, of course, it certainly didn't. But it was enough to suffice for me, at least; obviously, there had not been any new LK material for a while, and when it came out, I was just then starting to get back into the franchise after many years of being out of the loop.
If one knows his or her Shakespeare (or, at least, has memorized every random LK fact known to man), one'll know that conceivably the first two LK movies were based loosely on a Shakespearean work (or had striking similarities). 1.5 was no different, really, for it was based on a play that was BASED on a Shakespearean work--Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, by Tom Stoppard. Without a shadow of a doubt, this play is my favorite play of all time because of its witty, comical backstory to the more-recognized Hamlet, written of course by Shakespeare. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead featured a multitude of scenes in which the titular characters (who were supporting players in the original Hamlet, as Timon and Pumbaa were in LK) appear in the background of a famous scene of Hamlet--thus showing that they (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) were in fact in every scene of the original play in some capacity.
Now, many of us are aware that LK was loosely inspired by Hamlet. Thus, Lion King 1.5 is the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to The Lion King's Hamlet. And it works well, especially if one knows the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play well-- recalling how hilarious the play was in relation to Hamlet, this made 1.5 all the more enjoyable to me.
It didn't disappoint me that they "messed" with some of the original scenes. I LOVED that!-- another take on a classic scene from a classic movie. It certainly wasn't intended to tarnish the original scene, but instead to create an alternate, comical take on how something actually occurred, and how something can be seen from a different point of view.
And the animation was fine to me. I'm just a lover of animation, through and through: to me, whether it's CGI-influenced or not, it's still animation, and that's what I love. Purists are purists, and that's all right, but with the computer age dawning, a predilection toward animation assisted or done completely by computer was just bound to happen. While I cannot truly say what Walt Disney would've thought about this (NO one can), I can only speculate from what I know of the man that he would've understood that the time for an evolution in animation was imminent, and he would've been behind this project. Once again, that is an opinionated statement based on what I KNOW of Walt, but I am not saying that, undoubtedly, he would have liked the direction animation has gone in. But I digress.
This is not to say I enjoyed the entire movie-- the entire Meerkat back story with Ma and Uncle Max is slightly annoying, though only more annoying is their infernal song-- but it was a sufficient movie all and all. It was undoubtedly going to offend some purists to the original, but I don't think you can find one movie whose sequel did not do that. It was merely meant to entertain and to provide a witty back story (rather than inventing a whole new story, which very well could've ended bad), and I must say that, taking it for what it is, I enjoyed it very much. If that makes me a bad TLK fan, oh well.

