The Lion King director Jon Favreau has a special message for India

Cast - Donald Glover, Beyonce Knowles-Carter, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Seth Rogen, Billy Eichner, John Oliver, James Earl Jones

The new Lion King is like a deeply triggering and very expensive episode of Planet Earth narrated by Childish Gambino, here to traumatise a whole new generation of viewers. Falsely described as a live-action remake, the film is, more accurately, a photorealistic animated demo reel for times to come, when actors and emotion are rendered obsolete, and our entertainment needs are facilitated by one corporation trapped in a circle of life of its own making.

For a film that exists purely to make money, it is narratively bankrupt - a shot-for-shot remake of a universally beloved classic that is ironically less affecting, despite aiming for realism, than the cartoon that inspired it. The story is still engaging, though, but it always has been, ever since it was called Hamlet. The new Lion King, I’m afraid, is tonally and visually similar to director Jon Favreau’s remake of The Jungle Book - a quasi-realistic fantasy in which animals (sort of) talk, but display none of the magic this very basic concept of talking animals demands.