This is the iconic opening scene in "The Lion King."
Compared to the original,
it's an almost shot-for-shot remake,
but take a closer look at Rafiki.
In the 1994 film he stands while lifting the cub,
and in the new version he sits.
That's because Rafiki is a mandrill,
an animal that couldn't actually stand
while lifting a lion cub.
Striking that balance between
staying true to the original film
and creating a hyper-realistically animated
"Lion King" for a new audience
was a particularly tough challenge,
and it required literally millions of hours of animating.
The visual-effects masters at MPC Film
helped animate this ambitious live-action remake.
Their fingerprints are all over films
that combine live action and CGI animation,
from "Dumbo" to "Detective Pikachu."
But it was their work on another Disney remake,
"The Jungle Book," that really paved the way
for what they were able to achieve with "The Lion King."
This is Elliot Newman,
one of the VFX Supervisors on "The Lion King."
If you want a sense of just how much work Newman
and the MPC Film team put into this project,
take a look at a few stats.
MPC Film estimates that there were about 77 million hours
of rendering animation throughout all of their departments.
If they used a single computer,
it would've taken 8,790 years to finish the movie.
Before they could begin fully animating,
they had to actually shoot the movie,
and the actors needed to record their voices.
Instead of just recording their voices in a sound booth,
the actors were actually able to move around,
as some scenes were recorded
in what is called a black box theater.
This bare-bones setup gave the actors room
to interact with the cast and even improvise.
Some parts though were recorded in a recording booth.
Donald Glover: Mercy? After what you did?
Narrator: While not motion captured,
the actors' performances were recorded
and used by animators as a point of reference.
The first steps in animation happen
in what's called pre-visualization.
The animation team worked
with animation supervisor Andy Jones
to create simplified animated sequences
that could be used for virtual reality.
This VR approach on set,
which they called virtual production, was unique.
Director Jon Favreau and several crew members would put
on VR headsets which allowed them to actually step foot
in the virtual set they created.
This way, they could set up shots,
adjust lighting, and choreograph movements.
They treated this digital environment
like a place that really existed.
The animals and environments were created at the same time,
and rough versions of the animations could be viewed
on monitors while shooting took place.
They would eventually add more fully realized details
and other crucial aspects, like lighting, after production.
We'll get more into that later.
And, yes, there were real cameras tracking Timon And Pumbaa.
Creating the camera movements in real life,
rather than just in the computer, allowed the filmmakers
to create a nature-documentary-like feel.
When it came to animals, they had to toe the fine line
between creating realistic animals
and staying true to the original movie.
Newman: Even though we were making
very realistic-looking lions,
we still needed to make sure that when you look at Simba
you kind of resonate that that's Simba,
and you understand that
that's the character you're looking at,
or, you know, if you're looking at Mufasa,
then he's got the right visual style for you
to kind of remember that that's, you know,
he is the alpha lion and, you know, he's larger than life
and he has this presence about him, you know.
Narrator: The animals were a combination
of storyboards, sketches, and exhaustive research.
Favreau and the team
took a trip to Africa,
where they observed real animals in their natural habitats,
which helped them build the world,
plus they could get up close and personal
with a lot of the animals
at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida.
They also read anatomy books and science papers
and watched hours of documentaries
and other reference footage.
Many of the animals the crew saw
in Kenya inspired the characters.
For example, an excited lion cub they saw
running around as the rest of the pride slept
was a big influence on how they animated Simba.
For some animals, making them both realistic
as well as faithful to the original wasn't easy.
Perhaps the best example of that is Rafiki.
Newman: If you put him against a real mandrill,
you'd see some differences.
Narrator: Rafiki's most famous moment comes
when he stands and lifts Simba over his head
for all the Pride Lands to see.
As we mentioned, mandrills can't really stand up like that.
However, the movie is shot and edited in such a way
that you'll barely notice a difference.
Because Rafiki is in the primate family,
he's the character most similar to a human.
Therefore, they were able to add
some more humanlike qualities and emotions to him.
The animators, however, took some liberties
and occasionally strayed from realism in a few places.
Take Scar, for example.
His design was the furthest from reality
compared to the other lions,
but they made it work.
He has a lot of physical qualities
that are different from an actual lion,
like his size and the shape of his skull.
Newman: He feels more like a character
than the rest of them,
but actually once he was in the shots
and once we'd lit things and we'd put the environment in
and his performance was there, it was all animated,
he worked in every shot.
It was, you know, one of the best characters we had.
Narrator: The animators also had the challenge
of making the animals not only realistic
but able to sing and talk.
One change: They repositioned some animals' heads
so the audience wouldn't always have to stare
right into their mouths.
They still had to make sure their mouths moved
how they did in real life,
so they timed the character's breathing to their dialogue.
Jones said they would let the belly muscles
and diaphragm tighten.
That way, it felt like a given animal
was forcing air out of its mouth as they spoke.
Each layer of these animals went through simulations,
an additional phase of animation
where skin details, such as muscle ripples,
skin wrinkles, and fur interaction, are all added.
All of these details are too complex to hand-animate,
so they need simulations to generate them.
The average first simulation,
for instance, took eight hours to complete.
One of the biggest improvements
MPC Film wanted to make since "The Jungle Book"
was how they portrayed the layers of each animal,
especially their muscles.
Newman: Something that's quite common in CG
is that you kind of get this water-balloon effect
when you simulate muscles.
Narrator: This effect occurs
when the muscles bounce around too much.
On the other hand, animators also run the risk
of making the characters look too stiff.
Newman: The problem with that is
because there's a lot of collisions
happening under the skin,
that's quite difficult to simulate,
but on "The Lion King" we added hard surface joints,
bones, basically, that those muscles would collide
and slide against,
and it reduced that sort of water-balloon movement.
Narrator: And even if we don't notice it,
there are several visual factors
to making the skin look just right,
like how light bounces off of it and how it moves.
Separate teams worked on each layer,
perhaps none being more important than hair,
given that nearly every character
in the movie is covered in it.
Part of the reason
they really had to nail things like muscles, bones,
and skin is because a lion's hair is so short
that there's less to hide
how the skin and bones move beneath.
Female lions have even less hair
than their male counterparts,
and because they have no manes,
you can fully see their necks.
For characters like Nala,
they had to add certain movements to the neck and esophagus
for moments when she's speaking.
The male lions have manes,
which presented their own set of challenges.
Newman: Typically, the longer the hair is,
the harder it is to simulate.
You get 1% of the whole density of the groom,
you can then use that
to kind of approximate the surrounding hairs
that move and collide with each other.
Narrator: Adult Simba's mane alone consisted
of about 700,000 strands of hair.
And the hairs can't just sit still.
The animation team created new systems for "The Lion King,"
specifically for gusts of wind passing through long hair.
The hairs on a lion's mane blowing in the wind
can be tricky to control,
so they made sure the strands behind the leading hairs
in these shots wouldn't move as much,
helping to create a sense
that these animals were covered in layers of hair.
While extremely subtle,
Newman says it's the kind of specific detail that,
if not done correctly, the viewer will notice.
Newman: But it's that kind of level of detail
that we have to get to, to kind of reach that kind of,
the audience is believing what they're looking at.
Narrator: But sometimes they actually needed less detail.
Take, for example, the infamous
wildebeest stampede sequence.
The animators started by building up a big library
of animated clips of wildebeests doing different actions,
whether that be walking, jumping, or changing direction.
This allowed them to more easily create
a massive crowd in motion.
The wildebeests in the distance were able
to have more simplified features
and could be done by simulation,
while they had to animate the wildebeests
that were closer to the camera,
and thus more visible to the eye.
Of course, the world surrounding the animals
was equally important.
They built landscapes based on many real-life locations
in places like Kenya, Namibia, and California.
Another piece of technology
they worked on since "The Jungle Book"
was what Newman referred to as a scatter tool.
It allowed animators to sprinkle elements
across the surface, like twigs, leaves, and stones,
instead of just placing them there one by one.
It's a big part of the reason
"The Lion King" feels so realistic,
down to every tiny detail.
One sequence really shows off MPC's work creating
both the environments and the animals in them:
"Circle of Life."
Newman: I was on the movie for about two and a half years,
and we were working on that sequence up until the end.
It was really challenging.
You know, just the scale of it
and the complexity shot by shot.
Every shot was slightly different
in a slightly different part of the world.
The light is different in every shot.
Narrator: In an interview with Vanity Fair,
Favreau cited an example
of a giraffe bowing during "Circle of Life."
They would start with pencil drawings
of what they wanted the action to be
against reference footage
of an animal doing a similar action,
and then hand-animate it.
And there were a lot of bowing animals
in that sequence to coordinate,
and that's after getting Rafiki to move correctly.
The most surprising thing about this sequence is that
it actually contains the movie's only non-CGI shot.
Favreau snuck in one real visual,
which was captured in Africa.
Everything from the stones on the ground,
to the hairs on Simba,
to the way Rafiki moved,
to the way the cameras captured it all,
allowed for an experience in which the audience felt like
they were stepping into the real-life African savanna,
while still spending time with the same animated characters
we first fell in love with back in 1994.