Moonlight director Barry Jenkins’s all-action tale boasts uncanny CGI effects and songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, ​​but the screenplay is schmaltzy and derivative

It’s a technical marvel. Using the same photorealistic CGI techniques as John Favreau’s 2019 “live-action” remake of the classic 1994 Disney animation The Lion King, this origin story for Mufasa, father of Simba and the character whose death is the inciting incident in the original film, is a visually arresting spectacle. Directed by Barry Jenkins, the indie darling behind the triple Oscar-winning masterpiece Moonlight, and the similarly lauded If Beale Street Could Talk, Mufasa: The Lion King feels like a massive leap forward in terms of the rendering capacity of the computer animation software.

It captures not just the fur, but the play of muscle and sinew beneath it; not just water and ice but the minute refractions of light through a droplet or crystal. It even solves the lack of facial expression of the somewhat taxidermied-looking animals in the 2019 film. Gaze into the limpid, amber eyes of Mufasa (authoritatively voiced by Aaron Pierre, continuing his trajectory towards superstardom) and you can almost see his soul. Or you could, were it not for the fact that soul is one aspect that is conspicuously absent from this beautiful but cynical corporate exercise.