Animated films typically take longer to make than live-action films, but spending 3 ½ years creating sound for a film – even an animated one – is certainly extraordinary. The sound team on Director Barry Jenkins’s animated Disney film Mufasa: The Lion King spent that time productively – evolving the sound to match and sometimes inform picture changes, reworking scenes, experimenting with new techniques, and perfecting every detail. Jenkins wanted a big, bold sound – often giving notes asking to make things “bigger” – and he gave his sound team time to do just that.

Barry teamed up once again with Emmy, CAS, and MPSE Award-winning supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer Onnalee Blank at Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services in Burbank, with whom he had worked on his Amazon Original series The Underground Railroad. Blank built an all-star, award-winning sound team that included sound designer Harry Cohen, sound designer Paula Fairfield, sound designer Luke Gibleon, and many more named below in the story.

Here, Blank, Cohen, Fairfield, and Gibleon talk about their journey of crafting the film’s incredible sound, from building backgrounds using layers of individual birds and bugs, cutting tons of lion sound effects to play beside, in between, and sometimes underneath dialogue, pitching and timing sound effects to songs and score, adding constant movement and -bys using Doppler processing, making action scenes exciting yet not scary for young audience members, editing hundreds of foley tracks to make the realistic-looking animation feel even more lifelike, and much, much more!

Mufasa: The Lion King | Official Trailer
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