What did you draw from the original Lion King for inspiration? The film is a celebration of new recordings as well as old recordings that I have made, as well as old recordings that are in the Lucasfilm library or the BBC. I love the BBC historical library because there are recordings of those types of atmospheres that I can extract and build into a clean believable ambience.

But then we also have a huge library of sounds. We sent one person to Africa who recorded a bunch of backgrounds for us and we used those extensively. Sometimes we hear almost no Foley, intentionally, to sell a light-footed animal … but fill that void with something, and oftentimes that’s the challenge. So we had to find that sense of simplicity that gave our characters a medium for their dialogue to fit in and their movement to fit in, but at the same time Jon was very adamant that little creatures and cats intentionally don’t make sound because they don’t want to be heard. In a lot of cases where we were in simple scenes - for example, when young Simba is out in the desert, in this vast open space - you would capture sound on a location like that which is hard for the human ear to describe. It definitely affected the way we approached the mix. As much as it freed us up in many regards, it also gave us additional challenges because there is a sort of air of reality that you get out of production that as a sound designer and mixer I kind of rely upon. Yes, that did affect the way we approached it and ultimately to some extent the way the film sounds. The Lion King was made using virtual production techniques, but for sound, I’d imagine it was the same approach as working on an animated feature to the extent that there wasn’t any production sound (meaning sound recorded during a live-action shoot). I think we all felt that this wasn’t so much a remake of the original as it was a celebration of the original.”

“At the end of the day, it’s not about what you do in any given place, it’s more about capturing the emotion that is on the screen and understanding how it was approached in the original and applying that to the new medium. “We’d listen to the original to see what they did, because there was a lot of reverence paid to the original approach,” said Skywalker Sound’s Boyes, a four-time Oscar winner for Titanic, Pearl Harbor, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and King Kong. Just prior to the release of Jon’s Favreau’s box office record-breaking The Lion King, the film’s supervising sound editor, designer and rerecording mixer Christopher Boyes talked with The Hollywood Reporter about working to create the live-action remake’s thunderous stampede, animal and bird vocalizations, and even a surprising use of a roar from the 1994 animated Lion King.

King kong sound effects