CHRISTOPHER STEVENS' five-star review of Lion: Africa as only the lions have seen it before - and it's utterly exhilarating

Lion (Disney+ and National Geographic) 

Rating: Five stars out of five

As the sun goes down over Kenya's Maasai Mara, a pride of about 15 lionesses and their cubs is lolling around a thorn tree.

We're so close, we can see the dew on their whiskers. When one blinks, the membrane beneath its eyelid slides over the eyeball like a windscreen wiper. 

One ear twitches as a fly — as big in close-up as a sparrow — buzzes the fine hairs along its ragged edge.

As a rusty darkness falls, an explosion of stars fills the sky like silver and purple fireflies.

Lion, the astonishing four-part wildlife documentary from Hollywood producer Jon Favreau (who previously directed the 2019 remake of Disney's The Lion King) and BBC natural history veteran Mike Gunton, shows us Africa in vivid detail that only the animals themselves have seen before.

State-of-the-art drone photography takes us so close to the big cats, we can almost feel their breath. 

This is very different to the long lens telephoto film-making that has delivered superb landmark series such as Planet Earth and Our Planet, where we crept as close as possible to the animals but held to a single viewpoint.

Now the camera can track alongside the lions, hover above them, even circle through the pride. It's as though we've become one of them, and the sensation is exhilarating.

Narrated by stage actor OJ Lynch, who played Mufasa in a West End production of The Lion King, the show took four years to film — a total of 52 separate shoots across 1,400 days. 

Wildlife crews tracked about 50 lions, before Favreau and Gunton decided to focus on the story of one cub they called Kio.

Like Simba, the lion princeling voiced by Matthew Broderick in Disney's 1994 cartoon musical The Lion King, Kio is destined to rule the savannah. 

But before he can lead the pride, he must survive tragedies and ordeals, including a wildfire on the grasslands. 

And of course, there's an older male lion, a wicked uncle, who would gladly see him eaten by hyenas.

The first two episodes, which aired on the National Geographic channel as the whole series went live on Disney+'s streaming service, follow Kio from a few days old to adolescence. 

At his most kittenish, he's adorable — snuggled by his mother's muzzle, or scrabbling to climb a tree (and toppling off).

As he grows, he begins to explore, drinking in the dangers of the world around him.

This is all done in the identifiable Disney style, with an emphasis on both how cute and how much like a human child the little lion is. 

But the episodes are graded 12+, suitable for older children, because the reality of life with the lions is brutal. One hunt, where the pride stalks a buffalo, turns to carnage as the herd turns on them, tossing an unlucky lioness into the air like a rag doll. 

However much you love classic wildlife series, you've never seen anything like this.