Animation can convey human emotions in non-human characters largely through various uses of stylization and anthropomorphism. Adoption of a hyper-realistic look largely closes off those opportunities. A lion face cannot make a human expression. You have to be able to stretch it around and reshape it to turn it into a reasonably readable representation of a human expression of emotion. You can do that in hand-drawn animation such as the original or very stylized computer animation like Zootopia. With a hyper-real look, you’re stuck with a lion’s natural range of expression, which might be easily readable by lions, but is muted for human observers. The hyper-realism also greatly limits use of color.

I saw these problems glaringly in the trailer and this review tells me I wasn’t wrong.

The new Lion King is an amazing technical achievement, but a misguided one.