The loss of Jeremy Irons as Scar, despite Irons' professed interest in returning, was a substantial detriment to the remake. John Oliver is terribly distracting as the hornbill, Zazu. Perhaps most detrimental to the endeavor is the fact that the animals themselves just don't look right. No matter how many times animators attempt to provide human facial expressions to animals, all of that processing power cannot seem to make it work.

What are you talking about? The animators made no attempt to give the animals human facial expressions, intentionally limiting them to what their actual species are capable of. If you want animals with human facial expressions, look to Andy Serkis' 'Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle,' in which the performance capture technology works too well, creating an uncanny valley of human-animal hybrids for whom Dr. Moreau would be proud.

How is John Oliver any more distracting than Rowan Atkinson?

Chiwetel Ejiofor playing it straight makes a more believable and scarier version of Scar than did Jeremy Irons with his effeminate performance that bordered on parody and raised suspicions of gay-bashing. And re-working the song, 'Be Prepared,' if it was to be used at all, was necessary in order to eliminate the racial stereotypes in the original's portrayal of the hyenas.