Mufasa: The Lion King director and Academy Award-winner Barry Jenkins has revealed that his time working on Prime Video's The Underground Railroad with ILM helped him understand that he could be the one to bring this Lion King prequel to (the circle of) life.
Speaking to IGN, Jenkins shared that The Underground Railroad was his first "visual effects heavy" project, and it was an eye-opening one for him.
"It was something I always wanted to do," Jenkins said of working on a project making heavy use of CGI. “I was finishing the Underground Railroad when this project came to me, and so it was great to be working in a very visual effects heavy way for the first time in my career. I'd done visual effects but not in this way at all. It was really great to get an inside look at what that process was like. It helped me understand that I could make this film."
For those unfamiliar, The Underground Railroad was released on Prime Video in 2021 and was a series based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name by Colson Whitehead. It followed "Cora Randall's desperate bid for freedom in the Antebellum South."
ILM worked on the project and contributed to 122 shots over seven episodes, from "a CG recreation of the Chicago Train Hub, a sprawling network of underground tunnels and train tracks, and the fire-stricken plains of Tennessee."
As for the film itself, Jenkins spoke of Mufasa and how he is the embodiment of greatness, although that greatness was something he had to earn.
"Mufasa is greatness, he just is greatness," Jenkins said. "He's James Earl Jones, and he's basically perfect. And I think for kids it's really important to understand that people aren't born perfect, they aren't just kings, their experiences shape them. So you can expect to go on this journey and understand how his friends, his family, his experiences shaped him and made him the person he is.
"I think it's a great thing for kids to see, and for any human being to see, because maybe in the world we feel that, 'I can't be that because I wasn't born in this place,' and watching the original film, I just always assume, 'Oh Mufasa, obviously he's the king.' And in this film we get to experience how he became king."
Mufasa: The Lion King was officially announced at D23 2022 and will serve as a prequel to the 2019 live-action adaptation of The Lion King when it arrives in theaters in 2024. For everything else D23, check out our roundup of the Disney and Pixar Studio Showcase, the Marvel, Star Wars, and 20th Century Studio Showcase, and the Disney and Marvel Games Showcase.
Francesca Rivera is Video Producer at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @fbrivera.
Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
