In this context-the context out of which both versions of “The Lion King” emerge-whatever is called “African” functions as shorthand, connoting, in a single English word, a literally unimaginable plenitude of lives and livelihoods. For Americans, including those of the darker cast and caste, Africa tends to be little more than an idea, a formless place in which to house so much grief and longing. The detour from reality benefits “Black Is King,” which would otherwise have been saddled with all the colonial baggage of rendering Africa onscreen. “Black Is King” was filmed in various natural and man-made climes found in Ghana, Nigeria, Belgium, the U.S., the U.K., and South Africa, but it consists mostly of dreamscapes, rhapsodies of high fantasy unfurled in what may be called, without insult, a loosely twined collection of music videos-which, in their serial form, more closely resemble the album “Beyoncé,” from 2013,” than “ Lemonade,” from 2016. Anchored by the lyrical grandeur of its soundtrack, which includes the fourteen songs co-written and co-produced by Beyoncé for “The Gift” (“ BLACK PARADE,” a bonus single on the deluxe edition of the soundtrack, plays during the credits),“Black Is King” expertly slides between talk of bloodlines and molded thrones and more modest-but far from modest-footage of impeccably styled, beautiful Black people in motion.

Royal titles are treated, with urgency, as a means of affirming the innate worth of the human spirit, a message that the film aims especially at the many Black peoples who were long denied the status of human (and, depending on who is asked, still are). “Black Is King” follows a young child (Folajomi Akinmurele) whose wayward adventures and visions provoke the question of what kind of man he will become. The project is a cinematic adaptation of “The Lion King: The Gift,” the Beyoncé-produced companion album to Disney’s 2019 remake of the film, in which she voiced the part of Nala and for which she created an original song. “Black Is King,” the new “visual album” from Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter, borrows its bones from “The Lion King,” and is comparably interested in rehearsing the drama of its source material-which is to say, not very interested at all.

The story of Disney’s “The Lion King,” about a cub who avenges his uncle’s regicide, is said to have borrowed its bones from “Hamlet” (though Marlon James would say otherwise).

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