And this is Vanity Fair's notes on the scene.

I had just finished working on the Jungle book for Disney, and I had learned so much about visual effects and directing animation.

It occurred to me that, you know, we could really do something special with the movie.

The Lying King spoke to the people of Disney and pitch them on a vision of how we could present this in a way that felt Maurine the style of a documentary and is essentially going to be like the Jungle Book.

Except let's pull out the one human character and eliminated any need for photography or lights or real cameras.

And instead we photographed everything in V R and animated all of the performances with key frame animation.

It was, ah, a bit daunting because so many people have such a connection to the original film, and I knew that there were certain areas that we have to stick very closely to what was there Already.

It was different than jungle book because people know jungle Book, but they don't know jungle like they know lying King There's a whole generation that grew up watching Lion King on a loop, and it's an emotional film, and we tend to remember emotional stories more than we remember stories that don't have that element.

What I tend to do is is prioritize the scenes that I remember the most.

So before I go back and watch the movie again, I make a list of everything I remember from the movie and with Jungle Book.

There's probably about six things.

Seven things I remembered from watching it younger but with lying King.

That list is is the pages long you know, the circle of life.

You remember all those shots.

Remember the stampede?

You remember certain jokes.

You remember Hakuna Matata, Timon and Pumbaa?

The trick is to make people feel like they saw the old movie.

When you show them a new one, and if you show them the shots in the moments that they remember in lines of dialogue or songs, it kind of checks the box is in their mind, and then you have actually a lot of latitude to depart from it.

When you get into areas that people don't remember is clearly this particular sequence is almost shot for shot, though.

Here we have our cute little fella and in the old movie up here on the forehead, there used to be like a fruit juice, creating a little mark on his head, but in nature that actual fruits not filled with red paint and we chose to have a pigment that comes from roots, and that's how we have a little splash of color there.

We really put a lot of attention into the detail of the fur.

And much like a documentary, we chose to make it appear long lens because with documentaries often you can't get close enough to the subject.

And so, as you see, here's here's the subject in the foreground and the background is all blurry on shorter lines.

You could hold everything in focus, but here you have to choose.

And so this is, Ah, long lens shot.

So if you remember in the original movie, when Rafiki lifts up baby Simba, you have, you know, So the plenty standing on and he stands up baby symbols here.

He holds it up with his arms, but unfortunately the center of gravity would not work in the way the anatomy is on our baboon friend Rafiki here, drawing it looks good, but whenever we pose Rafiki that way, it always look fake.

And physics is something that everybody's an expert in.

Whether they realize it consciously or not, it feels wrong to them.

So this is one of those where we want to make you think you see exactly what was in the old movie.

But actually the cut happens cleverly, right.

As he gets lifted, you get a little glimpse of it up here, but it's obscured by the edge of the rock, so you never actually see that the center of gravity's off, and then a lot of attention is paid on the framing, so you get just enough to see it and you're out of it, part of what makes the shot look so nice.

And this is what's so good about having something like Caleb Deschanel is.

Your cinematographer is the lighting and backlight is something that works really well.

You see it used in really beautiful documentaries, but also with visual effects.

It's a great way to help make something like photo rial, because when something's backlit, you kind of read into the details you know what you don't see.

Your imagination fills in and it feels more real than it is.

I also want to point something out here.

You know, we were able to pay tribute to a species that unfortunately, during the course of making this, we found out when extinct the northern white rhino, hopefully having these images so realistic and for kids to see it for the first time.

They may develop a relationship and feel a sense of responsibility to help protect this and the fact that technology could make it look so photo real.

It becomes harder and harder to make a case that you need to actually put animals in danger when making movies thes air shots that are very reminiscent of what was in the old version of the film.

You see the sun breaking through and the sun hits baby Simba, and so you see the light change that takes place again.

It's a long lands, and you see it on Simba to part of what's so cool about working with visual effects artists is they make it so convincing by the way it interacts with fur, the rock face and because the light is kind of side lit.

You don't get that flat lighting.

You get kind of a side and back light on Rafiki, which is slightly cheated, actually, because you see, if you wanted to be on the front of Simba but Rafiki would really benefits from the side light again.

When you have flat front the light, it kind of reveals imperfections in CG characters and backlighting.

Sidelight is always beautiful photographically whether you doing a documentary or a CG shot.

Lightning is a big part of what makes this the effects convincing here in order to keep it feeling a bit more like a documentary and more like something that was natural to try to fool people into thinking they were seeing something that was live action.

We had to communicate a lot of the emotion by their body movement.

You know, you could do anything.

You could have an animal do anything, ever animating it and often times in films like, you know, like Madagascar, you exaggerate.

The movements of the animals are inspired by the animals.

But you you exaggerated for comedic effect.

In this case, we wanted to hold ourselves to the standard of what you would do as though this were a live action shot that had to fit into a live action film and how you would do that, as you would just look at all this great reference, you know, in like they made Bambi.

Walt would bring in animals for the animators to sketch.

But now, thanks to the Internet, you have libraries and libraries of footage of animals, so you have all the reference you you could ever want.

For example, if we wanted a bowing giraffe, it would start with pencil drawings to indicate what the action should be.

And then we would go through the Library of Reference Video and that we would include thumbnails of ones that seemed like it might work within this, and animators were then hand animate.

The characters that we've designed to be a CZ photo real is possible.

So what we did is we took natural movements that they might do like to bow their head, but we coordinated it in a way where it looks like they're all doing it together.

So individually, these actions are very natural, and there's not a lot of expression change on their face, and here you have that beautiful sidelight on back light that we talked about before to help really sell it.

So hopefully it has the aesthetic of a real animal to get authenticity, and part of it was with scouting after the initial scout would send crews in to take still photographs for photo Gramma Tree program A tree is something that you do to get the specific textures of real rocks and such so that you could take that texture, map it onto the three D geometric assets that were used to create the three D set for us tow scout in V.

R set cameras and ultimately render in Maya.

Here we come to another iconic moment from the end of the sequence from the original.

And so here we see saw Robbie and Mufasa.

We see the silhouette in the distance of Rafiki holding the baby.

We see it once again, backlit animals to make it look beautiful.

We have a side lit, contoured pride rock, and something that I like to do is I like to keep the skies very simple, because you have to get very lucky to have a beautiful sky when you're really photographing.

But in CG, you could put in whatever Skye you want.

Often, CG artists are tempted to make the skies beautiful, cause why not?

It costs the same amount.

It's just is easy to do.

But I find when I watch a movie with a lot of beautiful skies, one after the other, I'm like, That's too lucky for real photography.

And to me there's something beautiful about naturalism.

And so this is one of the prettier skies in the movie.

But you could see that we we showed a lot of restraint and didn't put like billowing clouds.

It looks kind of simple.

The sun is just scraping the animals and the grass toe.

Add Cem, Cem, Contour and some separation.

All of this imagery is important, but the most important thing is the music, because that's what we really remember.

Way always knew he wanted to use the original song where we could.

We wanted to re record them.

Also, Hans Zimmer wanted an opportunity to really get in there and finish it because the original it was something where they had a schedule on a budget.

There was a lot of digital instruments in that in that orchestra and here was an opportunity for him to re record it and updated Thio, as they said, to help match the new visuals.

I think part of White Lion King still holds up is that the story is so timeless and enduring, and the myths are so clear and the archetypes air so specific stories that repeat themselves with these same characters in the same situations, all the way back to ancient Egypt.

I think part of what makes a timeless and part of what makes a Disney classic is combining the old stories with the new technology.

And that combination makes it memorable, but also is part of what I think Walt Disney brought to his style of storytelling, trying to tell stories that aren't just locked into our time frame, but but ones that have endured over many generations but presenting it with new tools his time he was dealing with things like Rhoda scope and with locking picture to sound for the first time in Steamboat Willie, audio animatronics and Disneyland.

So he was always looking for the new tack toe help breathe the magic into these old stories.