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I learned about this film early in 2004 when I saw a trailer for it on the "Finding Nemo" DVD. That was before I rediscovered "The Lion King", so I didn't have much interest in seeing it at the time. Four years later, I have finally seen it. Even though I wasn't too impressed with "The Lion King II: Simba's Pride" overall, I still gave this one a chance. However, both of the LK sequels (though "The Lion King 1½" isn't exactly a sequel) weren't that much different for me. I think the main difference I found was that this one is slightly inferior.In this film, the main characters are Timon and Pumbaa, instead of Simba. Basically, the movie tells the original story at their point of view, starting before Simba. The story begins with Timon's unhappy life in a meerkat colony. The story then moves on to the young meerkat leaving his colony, learning about "Hakuna Matata", and meeting Pumbaa, a lonely warthog, for the first time. After this, it shows their lives together, and eventually, of course, their adventures with Simba. All of these things tell viewers parts of the story they've never known before.Timon and Pumbaa are responsible for a lot of the humour in the original "Lion King", but as I stated in my review of "The Lion King II: Simba's Pride", they're not they're not as consistent in that sequel. As the main characters in "The Lion King 1½", they're occasionally funny, like they are in the second film, but have not returned to full comic form. There's some surprising toilet humour (not a lot of it, but coming from a Disney animated film, it's still a bit surprising), usually involving Pumbaa and his farts, and I'm not sure whether this works or not. The part where the water hole stops bubbling as soon as Pumbaa gets out sort of left me with mixed feelings. If you ask me, the idea of this film, telling the original story at the point of view of other characters, was unnecessary, and I know I'm not alone. I'll admit, while watching it, stopping wouldn't have felt right, as I was curious to see what would happen. However, it's certainly not something I would want to watch again.I know not to expect sequels to be as good or better than their predecessors, as they sometimes are, but not usually. However, I have also learned that Disney's straight-to-video sequels (or ones that aren't really sequels, but still straight-to-video films that follow a theatrical film and use the same characters and setting, like this one), are usually if not always FAR inferior to their theatrical predecessors, and aren't usually too highly entertaining. My favourite of the ones I've seen is "Aladdin and the King of Thieves", but even that one didn't blow me away. Like I said, "The Lion King 1½" is better than "Belle's Magical World" (it definitely has less problems, I certainly can't complain too much about the animation here), but it does seem to lack quite a bit of what made the original "Lion King" so excellent.
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