The Lion King and the case of the missing roar!

It’s Monday (July 22) and we like to start off the week on the right foot. So this Monday, we are introducing a new and unique property called Saturday Shorts. Here you will read stories and features about something unique and funny that we’ve observed and you’ve missed out on! You’ll read Saturday Shorts every Saturday, but to give you a feel of this new property, here’s our first one. It’s about The Lion King, which released last Friday (July 19).

Anyone who’s grown up watching the 1994 classic animation film, The Lion King would vouch that Mufasa’s death scene was a real tearjerker – one of the most emotional and impactful scenes ever. In fact, it is easily one of the most iconic deaths in cinema! It’s a breath-taking moment, literally as the loving father and the dutiful King dies a brave death, while trying to save his son, the crown prince Simba, escape a Wildebeest stampede in the gorge. We all recall there was barely a dry eye seeing Mufasa fall off the cliffs to his death below after being pushed by his evil brother Scar. So, naturally when the Jon Favreau-directed new and the highly-advanced 3D animated version of The Lion King released, this was one of the most-looked forward to scenes from the film.

Mufasa in The Lion King

However, nothing prepared us for the unforgivable faux-pas in what was to be the most dramatic scene of the film. While the makers have left no CGI effect unexplored to give us a visually-stunning animation tugging on our heart-strings emotionally, they seem to have goofed up on this very crucial note. And you must have surely missed it. How? Read on!

We know very well that to be able to see the photo-realistic animals talk like us humans is a huge draw at the ticket window. But by nature, a lion always roars has been kept in mind by the makers throughout the film. You can hear Mufasa, Simba, Scar, Sarabi, Nala, all of them roar inspite of their human-dialogues! So, it comes as a shocker to see that in the most crucial scene when Mufasa falls off to his death, instead of letting out a natural lion’s roar that spirals and reflects his helplessness of the moment, the thundering voice-over by James Earl Jones, (and Shah Rukh Khan in the Hindi version) is heard letting out a human scream of ‘Aaaaaaa….’ Hard to digest, isn’t it? So much so, that it distracts us completely from the emotional quotient and jarred us to control a did-that-really-happen bewilderment moment!