The Lion King’s first trailer will have you pre-emptively crying

The Lion King doesn’t return to theaters until July, but the first full-fledged trailer will have you reaching for the tissues.

The Lion King knows it has a built-in audience of twenty- and thirty-somethings (and their kids). It could, if it so desired, release almost nothing in the way of promotion, and it’d still fill seats. To get a trailer, three months before the new live-action adaptation gets in theaters, feels like a gift — even though it’s really just standard marketing.

To have it be essentially narrated by Scar and Mufasa, with James Earl Jones reprising the role of the latter, is completely unfair, and we mean that in the nicest way possible.

Watch it below:

Okay, take a moment to just stop tearing up. It’s okay. We’ll all make it through this together. Note that the trailer does not show Mufasa’s death, but it does show the aftermath, with Scar telling Simba to leave and not return. Additionally, there’s an homage to the shots from “Hakuna Matata” in the original which show Simba growing from a cub to an adult lion, ready to reclaim Pride Rock.

The photo-realistic look is still tough to adjust to, but Scar and Mufasa’s designs in particular are really good. For a pair of brothers, they didn’t really look related in the original animation. Here, you can see some similarities, even as Scar is much mangier and has the cut in his ear as well as the scar that gives him his name over his eye. Mufasa, of course, looks exactly as majestic as he should.

Note that we also don’t hear Beyoncé’s Nala, although we see a brief glimpse of the character as an adult. Timon and Pumbaa, however, do appear, and this might be the hardest adjustment from the original animation. Warthogs are not traditionally cute, nor easy to make comedic. However, we trust that Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen’s voice acting will do the work of making us love them.

Tell us your favorite part of The Lion King trailer, and stay tuned, as the movie arrives July 19.