by TheLionPrince » December 6th, 2015, 9:07 pm
Okay, here's my two pieces on it.
The Lion King was always a film that could appeal to both adults and children. Brenda Chapman (story supervisor) or Lisa Keene (visual development artist) stated in the 2003 Platinum Edition bonus features that TLK was one of the films that helped Disney animated films to stop "being children's entertainment, and became just entertainment". I felt Simba's Pride continued that tradition. The Lion King 1½ feels like it was made for children, which is probably why it doesn't hold up as well as the first two movies did. The Lion Guard again is exclusively made for the pre-school audience with little to no adult appeal to older fans. I acknowledge that Ford Riley and his team have a target audience, but they could have took a page from the Toy Story 3 handbook and make a television movie and series that has cross-over appeal with adults. Even Sesame Street that is also targeted at the preschool crowd has adult appeal with their parody skits of popular media for the last forty-five years.
Nevertheless, my argument may be premature and the following series could appeal to us older fans, but what's done is done, and I will give it a chance before I decide if I want to continue watching or not.
My second reason is that the idea behind the Lion Guard doesn't mesh well with what has been established in the previous films. Scar would be banished for abusing his powers for evil, and it makes no sense how Mufasa never connected the disappearance of Scar's "roar of the elders" with the disappearance/murder of the male lions in his pride (it is never told if he did or not). However, if the commoner animals have heard rumors of Scar's abuse, why didn't they alert Mufasa about it? It's established that there is a shared mutal respect between the king and the animals. And it is annoying how what was established in Simba's Pride was ignored. With the rise of Zira and the Outsiders on the horizon, there has a good explanation why the Lion Guard weren't around when they invaded the Pride Lands at the end.
Lastly, Simba is a pretty take-charge father, and he ran at the sight and thought of Kiara being the danger when there was an erupting flame during her first hunt and when Kiara was hanging on the edge of the cliff towards the end after she tackled Zira. Here, he stood by and let the Lion Guard do all the work (which of course was necessary for the storyline).
And as far as I'm concerned, Don Hahn still works at Disney; he is producing the upcoming remake of Beauty and the Beast. He even introduced Ford Riley at the Disney D23 Expo so it leads to me to think he was aware it was being made. And I can live without the original filmmakers' involvement. Simba's Pride didn't have the involvement of the Allers-Minkoff-Hahn team, and it holds up just fine. 1½ had Roger Allers and Irene Mecchi's involvement, and I like that film the least of the two. The new filmmakers just need to respect the canon material and do it justice. It's all I'm asking.