Movie Thoughts: Leo the Lion (2005)

• Released: June 15 2005
• Directed by: Mario Cambi
• Running time: 1 h 25 min
• Rating 0.5/5

Synopsis

A vegetarian lion and his herbivore friends go on a journey to find the "Heart of the Jungle".

My Thoughts

Okay, so, I’ve wanted to check this one out for a while now, but never got the chance to due to Leo the Lion not being on the Dutch Netflix. As far as I know it doesn’t even have a release in my language, lol. I first heard of this movie’s existence through Saberspark’s video, and the "I’m A Vegetarian"-song became somewhat of a meme with some of my friends for a while, so I just had to check it out when given the opportunity. So brace yourselves for general awfulness as we dive into Leo the Lion!

This movie was just awful. Full stop. Is there really anything at all that salvages it? Let’s have a look.

First and foremost, and what arguably stands out the most: the visuals. I’ve seen very little movies that look worse than this one. Even some the Alpha and Omega sequels look better than this shit. There’s little to no texture on these characters; anatomy looks weird, unnatural, wonky and broken; some of the animals barely look like what species they’re supposed to represent, there is hardly any use of colors to set the scenes apart, the backgrounds look beyond crappy and above all: the animation. Good gods, the animation. It is just the absolute worst. The movements are often just random and like the animators didn’t know what they were doing, the speed is constantly off (either too fast or too slow. Watch the movie and you’ll see what I mean), the mouth movements barely even sync up (and at some points they don’t even move their jaws), some models are simply too low poly to properly animate with (see: the snake), the expressions are horrible and the general movements are just utter shit.

The story isn’t much better. The journey to the Heart of the Jungle really makes not much sense when you realize that they aren’t even in a jungle for the vast majority of the movie. The Heart itself isn’t even located in the jungle. It’s just a secret oasis in the middle of the canyons. I guess that the final point of proving someone to be bad, to learn to be who you are (even if that means you stand out) and learning to be a parent aren’t too bad, but the way it is executed is just bad.

I quite hate all of these characters. They’re either blank slates, which gives me nothing to work with; horribly annoying or just basic characters with only one or two traits that have the most basic of character development. The villain is one-dimensional and uninteresting, so he’s not much better.

The music is quite bad, too. Nothing stands out or sounds memorable.

The voice acting is wooden. I suppose it could’ve been worse, but it’s still just bad with a capital B.

I guess it’s also just really weird how they chose to have a vegetarian lion as protagonist? It’s just dumb, an overdone trope (to have a vegetarian predator) and executed in a bad way. The only thing I can compliment this movie for with this trope is that at the very least, Leo looks emaciated as fuck, and not healthy like his diet doesn’t affect him in any way. But in reality he’d easily be dead if he chose to not eat meat for the rest of his life, so it still isn’t saying much.

Also there’s a shitty reference (bordering on rip-off) to "Be Prepared" with the villain song. Not really sure why, just thought I’d mention it.

If you want a so-bad-it’s-good movie, prepare to be let down. It’s just awful in pretty much every way. The movie looks ugly, has an unmemorable soundtrack and jarring voice acting, a boring story and villain, uninteresting characters…

Definitely the worst lion-related movie I’ve seen this year. And here people keep complaining non-stop about Lion King 2019. There’s worse things out there, you know? If anything, direct your hate towards the really bad movies about lions that have actually terrible animation.