I'm actually a little disappointed in the music, since it's very clearly just the original track from 25 years ago with some added typical trailer music around it. (It also tells me that they probably haven't finished much of the soundtrack or score yet.) That's part of why I'm not too sure about how much the underscore is really going to pop relative to the original, since I imagine it's just going to be rearrangements using all the old themes and motifs, and I doubt Zimmer is going to write much new music for this if at all.
Speaking of sounds, I really hope they can get rid of the sound stage problem; in
The Jungle Book the animals' voices didn't sound like they were coming from the characters standing in the environment themselves, but rather you could tell that they were voices in a recording booth. The sounds weren't mixed well enough to make them sound like they were actually standing x distance away in a field or something. Not sure if it was rushed production or technical limitations, or maybe it's just something I picked up on my headphones as I watched the movie and this problem was imperceptible in the theaters, but I'd like to not hear that regardless. I actually found it way more immersion breaking than anything visual.
On that note, as I understand it based on an article and a behind-the-scenes video from
The Jungle Book --
https://youtu.be/-0MD1g_5dV4?t=180 -- the environments we're seeing are entirely CGI, presumably using actual photographs of real locations in Tanzania and Kenya as reference points for the landscapes and environment assets (plants, rocks, etc.). I'm not sure how they're going to interpret Timon and Pumbaa's jungle home, but otherwise I imagine they have an easier job here than they did with
The Jungle Book since there's more open space and less varied vegetation and landscapes; I wonder if that's part of why it looks better, just by virtue of having less to work with. Otherwise, the only real difference I'm aware of in the production process is that
The Lion King is using VR technology that allows the director to actually move around in the environment and block how he wants the framing of certain shots. To me, this is squarely in that happy medium between the cartoon and real life insofar as coloration goes; it's muted enough to look real but also colorful enough in the right spots/shots to sell its own sort of visual stylization.