When changing mediums from a cartoon to live action / realistic CGI, things are going to seem more muted and less like caricatures or archetypes. I think that a part of that (also in terms of
Aladdin) is that modern films place a bigger focus on the fact that it's less immediately easy to spot who a bad guy is, and especially that they're not just darker and more sinister-looking versions of everyone else (which I'd argue is an important and positive change).
One of the things that goes hand-in-hand with that is that while these films are meant to be close to the originals and also pull on the nostalgia of the original audience,
these are also going to be the original versions of the story for other generations of kids who really love the medium of ever-more-realistic computer graphics. When you think about
The Lion King or
The Jungle Book, they're stories that are intentionally set in the real world – but only portrayed as animation because that used to be the defacto way of telling stories where your imagination could create anything, and there wasn't any difference between the actors and the creatures and the world.
Most people are at least subtly aware that
Disney's animation is largely responsible for the more exaggerated and caricature-like portrayal of characters that influenced anime – which then created a bit of a feedback loop into the entire animation industry overall as time went on. If you think back to old shows like
Johnny Quest &
Scooby-Doo, their human characters have incredibly regularly proportioned human characters characters by comparison – but especially in their faces. If you're an artist, there's a reason that
animated caricatures of a particular variety are very popular. In almost every animated series with human characters, there are barely _any_ characters who have natural proportions.
However, there is a MASSIVE distinction that comes around when you're attempting to create a real-world-based story. This is largely driven in the games industry. Even
Final Fantasy games are returning back to a realm that pushes closer and closer towards realism. As a result, this is where a lot of the industry professionals are spending more and more of their time. In the film world, doing visual effects and digital makeup for actors and masking stunt doubles, etc. land in that same space. We'll see more and more stories being told in video games and other realtime rendered solutions, placed in a believable as the real world setting as those industries grow. I think that with this happening you're going to see a swing back in the other direction, where you'll have kids who're more interested in making stories in fantasy worlds that feel totally real, and that the benefits of animation and exaggeration start to become something that're used in their own way to craft the look and feel of a story –
Overwatch probably being a decent popular example of that kind of middleground, but also because they use a lot of classic animation techniques to exaggerate motion and features more in movement than in their designs.
Now to bring that all back around:
If you imagine yourself as a little kid and you're pretending to be a lion after seeing
The Lion King, there's something
really meaningful by having that lion appear to actually
BE a lion as they appear in the real world. You can tell fantastical stories that are closer to what they were meant to've been at the time they were originally conceived – which are as stories set in the real world with real animals. Inherently if you grew up on the originals, they're going to seem strange and foreign (
especially because without some of the exaggerations they lack some of the subtly psychologically manipulative and somewhat problematic techniques that make us care a LOT about these animated depictions). I like to think about it through the lens of assuming that you had nothing but the audio from the original and your imagination – since I used to listen to a
LOT of stories just on recordings or on the radio as a kid (I'm not
that old, but my parents didn't have a tv in our house when I was a kid).
These are the kinds of things that I imagined and the worlds that I always wanted to see, but that just weren't ever possible to portray, and I'm beyond happy that these are the things that are being done that actually make it worth retelling the stories.
tl;dr – While there's still a place for both the visual representations of a universe to be fully realistic like
Detective Pikachu or just a fancier version of the original like
Mewtwo Strikes Back Evolution, I'm glad that this version of
The Lion King is closer to the style of the former, and not the latter.
Also, if you don't think that they can be as expressive – I will wholeheartedly disagree with you. We still haven't seen the characters actively talking in the trailers, but mostly still just get everything as voiceovers with cuts to the characters (because that takes a TON of work to do), but just for reference – real lions have a full range of expressions that make for excellent animation – it just takes forever to get all of that put together as compared to a traditional 2D animation:
X 
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I love the cast and I think it is visually beautiful.
