DiCinema

The original Lion King clearly depicts the dearly departed Mufasa in the night sky, where he promised his son that he and the great kings of the past will always be observing Earthly events. But you have to squint to see the previous lion king's face in Favreau's film; his features are just barely visible within the clouds that drift above the African plains, with random lightning flashes functioning as his eyes. "A lot of that had to do with the style of the movie," Newman explains. "It would have been jarring if Mufasa was suddenly standing up there in the sky, because everything else is so hyper-real. Jon was always saying that he didn't want it to be a literal thing and draw the perfect outline of Mufasa in the clouds. He wanted it to have some build-up and drama, so it would feel really epic." According to Newman, it was actually more of a challenge for his team to not just slap Mufasa's face in the sky. "That sequence was quite hard to animate, because it was a really complex cloud and electrical simulations that took many hours to calculate and render. We had to figure out how to give Jon the benefit of working in a kind of sketch mode without him having to use his imagination too much. Because what would happen is that we'd block out a whole scene [as a sketch], and he'd go 'I can't really tell, but sure,' and then we'd present the final render and he'd say, 'I don't like it.' We ended up with a hybrid approach where we [put] layers of cloud simulation on top of an animated space, so we'd have some control over animating it by hand if we needed to modify it. When we presented it to Jon in that format, he could at least see how the clouds were moving and make decisions about the timing." Newman remembers Favreau testing out multiple variations of the scene, fully aware of how important it is to Simba's emotional journey. "We had some sessions with Jon where we were placing compositional elements in real time. We would take Simba and scale him down, or we'd take Mufasa's face and scale him up. Or we'd say, 'Maybe we need a reverse angle of Simba's reaction to the cloud here.' That scene was fluid right up until close to the end, to be honest. We wanted the filmmakers to feel they could engage with us, and not be like, 'Give us six months, and you'll see something at the end.'"

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