The Challenges of Animal Translation

Disney's 2019 remake of its 1994 classic "The Lion King" was a box-office success, grossing more than one and a half billion dollars. But it was also, in some ways, a failed experiment. The film's photo-realistic, computer-generated animals spoke with the rich, complex voices of actors such as Donald Glover and Chiwetel Ejiofor--and many viewers found it hard to reconcile the complex intonations of those voices with the feline gazes on the screen. In giving such persuasively nonhuman animals human personalities and thoughts, the film created a kind of cognitive dissonance. It had been easier to imagine the interiority of the stylized beasts in the original film.