How Barry Jenkins Approached ‘Mufasa: The Lion King’ as a Coming-of-Age Epic

Mufasa's greatness, which is a definitive element of The Lion King but is rarely seen, gets a rousing backstory as he overcomes varying adversities to earn his reverence.

As a coming-of-age tale, Jenkins says Mufasa: The Lion King falls within the wheelhouse of his best storytelling abilities. "Once I realized that it was just the tools that are different, it allowed me to have confidence in making the film, that I could tell the story the same way I've always told my stories."

Our conversation with Barry Jenkins has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

OkayAfrica: What was your relationship with the first Lion King film from the '90s?

Barry Jenkins: When I was a teenager, I would babysit my nephews from my sister, who was a single mother, so I was always trying to find the tape — it was all VHS tapes at the time — that would get the kids to calm down. The Lion King was the one they always watched the most, and I remember the scene where Simba walks up to Mufasa's body after Scar kills him. It struck me that they were processing the idea of losing their parents for the first time. That was a very intense thing for a child to do, yet they were doing it in this animated cartoon film. I thought that was a very powerful thing.

Did that reverence for The Lion King play a role in making Mufasa?

It played a small role. For me, the biggest thing was respecting the original film's legacy and what that means to people. You can't make a movie like this without understanding and accepting that this means so much to many people. Yet, it still was just about characters and family dynamics. I thought there were some really wonderful things that the screenwriter [Jeffrey Nathanson] was doing in this film that maybe hadn't been done in the other [Lion King] films, and they couldn't have been because Mufasa is only in the first movie for a very short window of his life.

This is quite different from what people know you for as a filmmaker, right?

Yeah, it's different, but only in the very surface way. It's an animated film and a franchise, so it is different in those ways. But the characters are very similar. If I was describing Moonlight and I was describing Mufasa, but I wasn't putting a title on them, you wouldn't know the difference between the two films. It starts with the character who was maybe ostracized from his community, who was picked on and is considered a pariah, who is separated in a certain way from his mother and has to find a way to build a new family out of these relationships within his community. That could apply to Chiron and Moonlight, or it could apply to Mufasa.

In that way, it isn't very different from all my past work. Once I realized that it was just the different tools, it gave me confidence in making the film and telling the story the same way I've always told my stories.

What do you think will be the effect of this film on viewers, especially those who will be watching for nostalgic reasons?

I think, especially for people who watch the film with nostalgia, people who have loved Mufasa and, in some ways, hated the character of Scar for 30 years, those characters have been frozen in time. When that happens, your idea of them becomes so concrete that you start to have a blind spot to all the other elements of that person. I hope those people will watch this film and see the idea of nature versus nurture.

You can see Mufasa loses his parents, and then he gets adopted by Scar's parents, but they're separated, and one character, Scar, is raised by a parent who's teaching him all the wrong things about the world. Mufasa is raised by a good parent, Eshe, the mother who teaches him all these beautiful things about the world that will lead him to believe in balance and the coexistence of building within a community. That is why these two characters become different persons. It will be incredibly moving for people who feel nostalgic for the characters.