Mufasa: The Lion King - 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray SteelBook

Upfront and out of the way, I am not a fan of the ongoing run of live-action Disney films. What started as a novelty with Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, or The Jungle Book has become a perfunctory exercise of IP excess. I didn’t care for Aladdin. Pinocchio was flat awful. Then came Jon Favreau’s The Lion King - which wasn’t really “live-action” so much as a “photo-realistic” CGI animated retelling. While the visuals certainly were lifelike, the lack of any emotion in the animal characters made it an odd and uncomfortable trip through the Uncanny Valley. But the film was a box office success pulling $1.7 billion globally, so another trip to Pride Rock was inevitable. But now we get a prequel telling the story of how Mufasa became King and Barry Jenkins steps in to give the film a more grounded emotive flare. 

Simba and Nala now rule over the Pride Lands. As they expect another cub, their first-born daughter Kiara (Blue Ivy Carter) is left in the care of faithful Timon (Billy Eichner) and Pumbaa (Seth Rogen). When a storm sets in, Rafiki (John Kani) arrives to help calm the young cub. With rain pouring and lightning crashing overhead, Rafiki tells the story of how the stray Mufasa and his adoptive brother Taka (Kevin Harrison Jr.) had to flee their home because of deadly white lions known as the Outsiders led by the evil Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen). Bound for the mythical land of Milele, Mufasa, and Taka will meet new friends Sarabi (Tiffany Boone), Zazu (Preston Nyman), and a certain wise baboon. 

I won’t go so far as to say that Mufasa: The Lion King is a perfect film, or even necessarily a “great” one, but I’ll say it’s better than the 2019 The Lion King. While this film’s story loses some of the Shakespearian dazzle, it’s nice to see something more original come along rather than another rehash effort from Disney. It helps to have a dramatic storyteller like Barry Jenkins at the helm of this outing injecting the work with more prescient thematic elements rather than simply doing the same movie again but with modern animation. Jenkins with writer Jeff Nathanson let the story and characters explore the definition of family and personal obligations beyond bloodlines. 

On top of getting to explore new ideas and themes, all credit to the animation team for pushing the boundaries of photorealism. The visuals are miraculously vivid and detailed letting every strand of fur, blade of grass, or drop of water come to life. Best of all, our animal characters actually have some kind of personality! Breaking the Uncanny Valley wall, this film lets our lion, bird, baboon, and all of the animal characters of the Pide Lands emote. When they’re happy or laughing they have a smile. When they’re sad, their brows appropriately furrow. When they’re angry their jaws menacingly pull back. They’re not fully “human-like” emotions, but it's enough to give the weight of any given scene a little more intensity. It’s a very welcome improvement. 

So what’s wrong with Mufasa? Two names: Timon and Pumbaa. While Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen are invigorating and hilarious versions of these characters, they’re obnoxious interruptions of the story. And it’s a frequent interruption to hear some irritating self-aware commentary that plagues the entire run of the film. What could have been a series of touching moments between the grandfatherly Rifiki and the young Kiara ala The Pincess Bride becomes a trite waste of time that does nothing but pad the runtime. And it’s a lot of padding! Cut out Timon and Pumbaa and you’d save a lot of dead time and let some of the more genuine dramatic moments breathe. For Mufasa: The Lion King, this is the hill on which my review will die. Not that it’s an unnecessary prequel, but that it wastes so much screen time so obnoxiously that it greatly impacted my overall enjoyment of an otherwise very good film.

Vital Disc Stats: The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray 
Mufasa: The Lion King roars onto 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray with a two-disc 4K + Blu-ray + Digital SteelBook release from Disney. The 4K is pressed on a BD66 disc with a BD50 serving the 1080p and bonus features. The discs are housed in a SteelBook case, an ongoing thing for new Disney titles it seems as no standard edition case option is available here in the States. The SteelBook is quite lovely I think, offering Mufasa as a cub and young adult on one side with Taka as a cub and young adult on the back. The discs load to Disney’s typical language options before rolling along to either the feature film or an animated main menu with basic navigation options.

As with Moana 2, the original press release for Mufasa didn’t indicate the HDR grade, but here we are and we do have Dolby Vision! Also in very small print, we have the “Dolby Vision/Atmos” logo actually on the artwork this time. While I still don’t understand Disney’s willy-nilly HDR application scheme, we’re now two-for-two for 4K releases with Dolby Vision HDR. Hopefully, that trend continues. If they’d get on board BD100 discs too, we’d be really cooking with fire. 

All disc tech specs aside, I’m very pleased with how vivid and impressively detailed this film looks on 2160p. The years have been kind to the animation team’s set of tools. Details in the hair, foliage, feathers, and scenic locations are often breathtaking. These visuals really do feel true to life now. On top of the improved details and the more emotive character animations, I felt the sense of weight and depth to the rendered imagery is vastly superior to the 2019 film. As good as that film looked for its time, I still thought it looked weightless. Comparing this 4K disc to the included Blu-ray, I really noticed how more clearly defined the fine lines were in 2160p. The bitrate might not sing for this release keeping to the mid-50mbps range, but it's an appropriate boost. The 1080p disc is a solid experience if that’s the way you want to roll, but this 4K is certainly more visually appealing. 

The Dolby Vision HDR grade also pumps some life into the dramatic colors, black levels, and contrast. Considering it’s The Lion King, of course, the colors are going to be gorgeous as primaries, and all the shades between come through beautifully. Likewise, the black levels and shadows lend to some dynamic lighting schemes helping that sense of depth and weight come through. I would have loved to see this film in 3D, a lot of the scene setups feel designed for that format, but in 2D the 4K is a beauty. 

Mufasa also enjoys a fairly robust Dolby Atmos mix. While there are stretches of the film where the height channels may feel a bit absent, the effect is well used when necessary. Storm scenes, scenes inside the cave, the big final climax, these are the moments where the expanse of the mix really kicks in. Likewise, LFE for this track can seem a tad restrained at times, but then when it’s called for like an elephant stampede or a crash of falling rocks there’s plenty of rumble kicking the subs. Throughout the run, the dialog is clean and easy to hear without any issues. The Lin-Manuel Miranda songs are catchy enough and enjoy great range through the surround spread. They might not be as good as the infectious earworms of the original film, some of the songs sound like Miranda broke into Paul Simon’s backyard, but they fill the space nicely. Also, they’re not so frequent as to be too intrusive to the main story, which is a plus in my book. Ultimately the effectiveness of this Atmos mix is location-dependent. Tight confined spaces or snowy mountaintops sound great and active and handily justify the object spacing. Open grasslands without any storms or much aerial activity, the height channels don’t get much of a workout. All of that is a long way of saying it’s a very good Atmos mix but not exactly demo-worthy. It gets the job done in fine form and does it better than the 7.1 DTS mix on the 1080p Blu-ray. That track I found rather lacking, more like checking boxes rather than doing anything dynamic with that kind of a channel spread. That seems to be par for the course though as Disney keeps putting notably lesser audio mixes on their 1080p discs.

Over the last few years, Disney has found itself in something of a routine when it comes to their bonus features options. We tend to get a nice assortment of amiable extras, but nothing that would go hard into real depth about the production. That’s all true for this release, but each segment for this set is frustratingly short. The making-of is especially brief, mostly made up of filler bits instead of anything actually informative. All told we’ve got under 40 minutes of pretty slim bonus materials to watch through once the show is over. 

4K UHD Disc

• Sing Along with the Movie 
• Song Selection

Blu-ray

• Sing Along with the Movie 
• Song Selection
• Finding Milele: The Making of Mufasa: The Lion King (HD 13:53)
• Songs of the Savanna (HD 8:40)
• Ostrich Eggs With Timon & Pumbaa (HD 4:31)
• Outtakes (HD 2:15)
• “I Always Wanted a Brother” IRL (HD 1:17)
• Deleted Scenes (HD 5:13)
• Who’s The Mole Rat? 
• What Do You Feel In There?
• Have Faith In Her
• Taka’s Dream
• Protect the Pride (HD 1:34)

We might not have needed a prequel to 2019’s The Lion King, but we got one, and amazingly enough Mufasa: The Lion King is actually pretty damn good. At any rate, I’d say I enjoyed it more than the 2019 photo-realistic “live-action” film. I liked that it was a new story with much more interesting and emotive animation for our animal characters. I didn’t need so much Timon and Pumbaa, but overall in my book, this is one of the rare prequels that’s a success. The 4K UHD offers up a lovely Dolby Vision transfer with an effective Atmos mix to match. Bonus features sadly aren’t a whole lot to write home about. I don’t understand Disney’s intent on only offering their films as SteelBook releases in the States, but it’s here and it’s quite good. If you can find the SteelBook at a good price consider it Recommended.