How The Lion King's Animation in the Live-Action Remake Compares to the Original (2024)

First there was The Jungle Book and Beauty and the Beast, next Dumbo, and then this summer's Aladdin. Over the past few years, Disney has built up a heavy roster of live-action remakes of their most beloved animated classics. But nothing has been more anticipated than the newest spin on The Lion King, which is in theaters July 19 and features an all-star cast including Donald Glover, Beyoncé, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Seth Rogen, and Billy Eichner—plus James Earl Jones returning as Mufasa (because who else?)

And directing the project is Jon Favreau, who uses the same Oscar-winning animation technology that was developed for the 2016 live-action edition of The Jungle Book. And due to his animation style, there's a big difference in how the film looks and feels, with many fans comparing what we've seen so far of the remake to the original. Favreau himself told USA Today that no, it's not a shot-for-shot copy of the 1994 version, but many scenes are just so iconic, they had to be included. "The original holds up incredibly well," he told the paper, "so the challenge here was to tell a story in a different way, but still deliver on people's expectations while surprising them somehow."

We took a side-by-side look at how the original 1994 movie's most iconic scenes compare to 2019 version's depiction—and how the animation has changed.

Another of the 1994 movie's most famous (and, uh, to an entire generation, rather traumatizing) scenes is the stampede Scar begins to trap Simba and Mufasa. Good news: It'll be in the 2019 movie as well—so the three years they spent animating the scene for the original clearly paid off.

Rafiki—the mandrill who presents Simba at his birth and serves as his spiritual guide throughout the movie—is given a more realistic depiction in 2019. In this new spin on the film, he looks a lot more like a real life mandrill—down to how the animal actually moves in the wild.

The "Simba Grows" montage—when we see Simba age, and go from the voice of Jonathan Taylor Thomas to Matthew Broderick in the original movie—is just a tiny segment of the "Hakuna Matata" song. While there are some differences between the original scene and the new one—no animals swinging from branches into large pools of water—at least this transformation is still included, to fans' relief.

12 Years A Slave star Chiwetel Ejiofor took over from Jeremy Irons for the role of the menacing and ambitious Scar, brother of Mufasa and Simba's uncle. Ejiofor says his Scar is more "psychologically possessed" than that of Irons'. And without the facial expressions of the original animated version, his voice alone had to depict the pure evil. Scar's character is based on King Claudius, the main antagonist of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and shares traits from Iago from Shakespeare's Othello. Given that Ejiofor knows a thing or two about Shakespeare, he feels perfectly cast.

For the 2019 remake, James Earl Jones reprises his role as King Mufasa, Simba's father—something that director Jon Favreau sees as "carrying the legacy" between the two films. And of course, the scene where Mufasa explains how the animal kingdom works to his son is basically the same as the original. According to director Favreau in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, almost all of Jones' dialogue is the same as the 1994 version: “James Earl Jones would do a take and then ask me for direction, and I honestly couldn’t give an answer! I was like, ‘You’re Mufasa!’ Everything he said sounded perfect because it was him saying it."

One of the biggest changes of the entire film is the hyenas: Eric Andre, Florence Kasumba, and Keegan-Michael Key are voicing Azizi, Shenzi, and Kamari. Shenzi was voiced by Whoopi Goldberg in the original, but Azizi and Kamari are the renamed characters of Cheech Marin's Banzai and Jim Cummings' Ed from the original film. While the hyenas were a menacing source of humor from the original film, they are leaning further into "menacing" than "humor" in the 2019 version based on their looks alone. Kasumba has said, "Those hyenas were funny. These hyenas are dangerous." Mufasaaaa.

The gathering of the animals is a key scene in both the animated and 2019's lifelike version. But Favreau wants viewers to know that the 1994 original and the 2019 rendition of The Lion King are really not the same. Talking to Empire, he shared that "If you look at the plot points, it tracks pretty accurately to the old one, but if you watched the films side by side, you'd realize they actually deviate a great deal."