My Thoughts (Some spoilers, but hey, most have seen the cartoon so...)

First of all, our theater was pretty full (the upper seats anyway, nobody sits in those lower neck-killing seats, not sure why they even have them.) Annoyingly enough, right behind me I had some older teens or young twenty-somethings who decided to talk the whole movie. This theater does assigned seating now, so it's not like you can move after you find out the annoying people are behind you, and like I said, it was mostly full and there weren't a lot of seats left when I paid anyway. Halfway through the film the couple that was in the seats a few seats over from me decided to let their 4yo have a pretty long conversation. Not sure why. She had previously said a few things here or there that weren't too distracting, but this conversation went on for quite awhile and I'm not sure why they allowed it to continue. I had gone to a later showing in hopes of avoiding this.

1) Hated this version of Circle of Life song, it just wasn't as good

2) Too many "jumpy" shots. This was pretty bad in the very beginning where they brought in the rodent that was to be Scar's breakfast, but there were various other places throughout the movie this occurred. Remind me of handing a camera to someone with no experience for bad home movies.

3) Loved the "I Just Can't Wait to be King" sequence where they highlighted the various baby animals. They also kept the energy of that song, so I thought they did a good job with it.

4) For the most part the scenes followed the cartoon, but it seemed like they took out things that maybe they felt were unnecessary and more for the cartoon, but that acted as good transistions or built up emotion in the original. For example, they barely gave Simba time to lie there next to his dead father before Scar came up and told him to run away and the chase was on, and even that was cut short.

Simba seems to recognize Nala awfully quick. Should've been a few more instances of her pinning him down, slashing at her face or something before that happened.

There were things in the cartoon I honestly didn't even notice until I had played the SNES game years and years back that I noticed when I re-watched it, and these were definitely missing in scenes like the elephant graveyard and such. Sliding down elephant vertebrae, parts of the stampede, little things like Zazu riding the tree branch in the river during the lecturing of "I Just Can't Wait to be King". Just fun visuals that I guess they felt were too cartoonish to keep in a "live-action" fillm.

5) Voicing - Did okay with most of the them. As I posted previously, I hated Timon's voice, but mixed in with the rest of the movie it was okay. Not sure how old the kid is they used to voice young Simba, but they maybe should have gone a little younger. Zazu's voice worked well. Something was surprisingly missing with Mufasa's voice - maybe it's just JEJ's age now, or maybe it was just how Disney directed him to read certain lines. I mean, they're the same lines with the same actor, so maybe it was just being trained to already hear them a certain way. Scar just wasn't the same.

6) Be Prepared - Horrid. The whole time it was happening I was transported back to a reading of Animal Farm and Napolean's rants, rather than being in the song sequence of a Disney movie. Although, I guess that means it does give off the right dictatorial ideal Scar is trying to create. I also missed the marching hyenas.

7) Visuals - Landscapes were stunning. Animals looked okay, but their movements at times appeared to have weird glitches or something where it appeared jumpy. One scene where it showed Simba and Mufasa at a slight distance, Mufasa was talking and it didn't appear that he was actually moving his mouth.

8) Rafiki - Why oh why did they minimize his role in this? Boo. I mean, he was there for all the right scenes, but they didn't give us the same Rafiki personality at all - just a hint of it.

9) Wasn't exactly fond of the "tuft of fur" scene used to get Rafiki to realize Simba was still alive. I mean, the animated version doesn't do a great job with this either, using the whole wind sequence, but at least that one seemed to flow better.

10) The humor they threw in that weren't in the original weren't too bad and added a bit to it, so I enjoyed them. I was especially curious how they planned to do the "live bait" scene and liked their new take on it until some idiot, who was obviously NOT a young child, had to vocalize behind me, "That's from ______!" Like, yeah, no crap. Thanks for enlightening us.

11) Disappointed they didn't use the original theater ending. We saw the original in theaters and the ending showed two lion cubs born to Simba and Nala. (The people I saw it with remember this, and I have found a couple of postings online who have said the same, so I know I didn't just imagine it.) I was hoping Disney would bring it back for the ending of this "just because", but no. Didn't happen. Oh well.

Overall, I'd give it a 7/10.