Like many of you, I first saw The Lion King in 1994.  I was a kid on the edge of college: to old for cartoons.  but to young for adulthood. Yesterday I watched it again, but this time decidedly as an adult, and with my 4 year old son.  And strangely enough, in 3D. 1994 was half a lifetime ago, and The Lion King blew me away. Howard Ashman had died, but Alan Menken was still here.  The skill and craftsmanship that had made The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin each wonderful films had not quite crumbed under the pretention and excess that would over-burden most of the next decade of Disney films, giving a a little unknown studio named Pixar a giant hole in which to drive into the international zeitgeist with some silly movie about toys that you might have heard of.

I’ve always loved The Lion King and I won’t spend much time on the plot.  You know it.  You’ve probably seen it on VHS or DVD or maybe even on broadway.  I sure have.    Instead I’m going to focus on what’s new this time.

The headline addition is the 3D which I was frankly a bit underwhelmed with.   Some of the sweeping african vistas are well served by the effect, but mostly it’s a straight up 2D to 3D conversion.  It’s nice, but it’s not worth the dimming affect of wearing sunglasses inside. Most made for 3D films feature a host of moments where something reaches out into the very near plane, but since The Lion King predates that, we are thankfully mostly spared that tedious convention.

The bigger problem for me was actually the faces.  A human face is relatively flat.  Sure, we have that nose protruding, but the inch between the eyes and the tip of the nose isn’t that big of a deal.  The 3D artists tried to add depth to these deep feline faces.  On close-up shots this often turned out to be highly distracting as the nose stuck out into your face, distracting you from the ‘windows to the soul’ that you probably should be looking at instead. Some of the weather effects were a bit irritating too.  And the dramatic stampede scene (famous for early use of CG crowd creation) felt oddly flat.

Does 3D make this movie better?  Nope.  Is the movie hindered by it?  Thankfully, no.

Just as a minor sidenote, the song “The Morning Report” added to the Special Edition version of the movie available on DVD is thankfully removed.  It was a real clunker of a number so I’m glad to see it on the cutting room floor.

For me the bigger difference this time around is that today I am a father of 2 little boys.  The 4 year old joined me for what was his 3rd movie theater visit (his first ever movie was Toy Story 3!).  I couldn’t help but realize that I see the movie differently today.  I always noticed the numerous fart jokes in this film, but fortunately I’m not the sort of parent who finds fart jokes annoying.

No, what I noticed is the pride Mufasa feels for his son as he teaches him to pounce, and the disappointment in his eyes when Simba is being chastised for breaking the rules. The smile in those same eyes is honest as father and son play together in the moonlight.  Those moments were discardable to me as a teenager, but today sitting in a theater with a 4 year old who keeps peaking over the edges of his tiny 3D Glasses (I didn’t know they made little glasses for kids!) and asking me why the screen is blurry… it took on a whole new meaning.

I could write a hundred pages on The Lion King: In a past life, I really thought that animation might be my future and I dedicated countless brain cells to Disney animation.  I’ve frame by framed through scenes with a 4 head VCR studying timing and looking for hidden mickeys.  I could talk about Andreas Deja’s masterful handling of Scar.  I could talk about the groundbreaking and seamless integration of CGI in a crowd scene, the scale of which had never been seen before.  I could write about the homosexual themes in the movie.  I could write about Tim Rice or Elton John.  Or about the Shakespearean roots of the story.

But I won’t.  Something else far more important struck me harder:

After the stampede sequence, where Mufasa is killed (spoiler alert, hah!) my 4 year old turns and looks to me with those big eyes and sadly tells me “Simba is alone now” and my heart crumbled.  I gave him a hug, and told him I loved him.  And then he asked for another gummi worm and the universe was right again.  Disney did good.