“I am Simba, son of Mufasa,” Aryan Khan says in a teaser for the Hindi dubbed version of The Lion King. “If I don’t protect the realm, who will?”
The Lion King is the coming of age tale of Simba, a lion cub driven out of his land by his evil uncle Scar. Simba is fooled by Scar into thinking that he has murdered his father, Mufasa. With the help of the lioness Nala, the warthog Pumbaa, the meerkat Timon, and the mandrill Rafiki, Simba wins back his kingdom.
Aryan Khan’s father, Shah Rukh Khan, has voiced Mufasa in the Hindi version. Jon Favreau’s live action adaptation of the 1994 animated blockbuster will be released in India on July 19 in English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.
The voice cast of the original production includes Donald Glover as Simba, James Earl Jones as Mufasa, Beyonce as Nala, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Scar, John Kani as Rafiki and Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen as Timon and Pumbaa respectively.
The Hindi voice cast includes Ashish Vidyarthi as Scar, Shreyas Talpade as Timon and Sanjay Mishra as Pumbaa. Siddharth voices Simba and Arvind Swami, Scar, in the Tamil dubbed version. Nani has voiced Simba in Telugu.
The Lion King is the latest live action version of a Disney animated film after The Jungle Book (2016), Dumbo (2019) and Aladdin (2019).