“The second you push it too far it feels like a cartoon. You have to elevate their status slightly, but without breaking their physicality by giving them obviously human-like gestures.
The priority, however, says animation supervisor Andrew R Jones, was “to take inspiration first and foremost from the way wild animals really behave. Their dialogue was recorded and cut into what Favreau describes as “the radio play version” of the story, while videos of their performances were sent to the animators, who used them as reference footage while crafting the animal characters’ movements. The shoot began with Favreau and his cast gathered in that same space – Beyoncé and Donald Glover, Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner, a returning James Earl Jones as Mufasa – acting out the entire film like a piece of theatre in the round. But just a few months earlier, things were different. To be clear, the goings-on in Warehouse 5419 feel anything but natural. But simultaneously, within a parallel digital realm, they’re surveying a film set that doesn’t actually exist.
The two men are standing a few feet apart, wearing virtual reality headsets, in a large, matt-black warehouse numbered 5419, in the Playa Vista suburb of Los Angeles, in February 2018. In a sense, none of this is really happening. “Better,” Deschanel nods, and starts sizing up his shot through a viewfinder. The sky instantly bruises and dims, and the promontory’s shadow whips across the ground almost too fast to see, like a tablecloth pulled out from under the dishes.
“Change it?” murmurs the 52-year-old Iron Man director, at which point Deschanel, 74, reaches up, grabs the sun in his fist, and drags it downward. Standing up there is the multi-Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who eyes the scene, then calls down to Favreau that the light isn’t quite right, in a quieter voice than you’d expect. It’s a little after nine in the morning, though the sun is unusually high, beating down on a rocky promontory that juts across the grassland. Jon Favreau is standing in the African savannah, eating a bowl of Rice Krispies.
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