Movie Gazette

Instead of writing a full review for this one, I was half-toying with the idea of simply cutting and pasting various chunks out of my write up for the original Lion King movie and writing the occasional new sentence in-between. After all, that’s basically what the creators of this needless prequel have done in making the straight-to-DVD ‘Lion King 3’. Things start off well enough. We get to see how Timon and Pumbaa (the meerkat and bush-pig comic-relief combo from the first film, voiced again by Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella) first came to be best bug-eating buds, and in the process of the first half hour are taken right up to where The Lion King kicks off. The trouble is, after 35 minutes it already feels like it’s finished – and that’s when desperation appears to sink in on the part of the screenwriters. With nowhere left to turn, the slug-munching duo end up walking around inside the first film, a bit like in Back to the Future II, only minus originality and intelligence. The whole thing degenerates into footage of the furry pair strolling through key scenes in the 1994 film, making sarcy remarks, altering our interpretation of how and why various events took place, and generally crippling everything that made The Lion King great. It’s not just cringe-worthy – it’s unforgivable. As usual with these cynical Disney cash-in projects, the standard of animation is fair-to-middling, and there’s a good range of extra interactive features on the DVD for the kiddy-winkles. There’s also a fairly impressive voice-over cast, with many of the big names from the first outing brought back – including Matthew Broderick, Whoopi Goldberg, Jim Cummings and Cheech Marin. But there is absolutely no conceivable reason why anyone in their right mind would choose this destructive dross over the sublime original. I cannot think of any other follow-up movie so rampant in its undermining of its own beginnings – and that’s coming from someone who, less than a year ago, was plonked in a cinema watching The Jungle Book 2.