Beyoncé flexes both her musicianship and her cultural leverage with “The Lion King: The Gift,” her companion album to the state-of-the-art remake of “The Lion King.” It’s her latest lesson in commandeering mass-market expectations, as she bends “The Lion King” to her own agenda of African-diaspora unity, self-worth, parental responsibility and righteous ambition.

Beyoncé was an obvious choice to be cast in an anointed blockbuster: the 25th-anniversary update of “The Lion King,” the 1994 animated Disney parable set in Africa. Its story of a young lion fleeing and then reclaiming his birthright had already generated a 1997 Broadway adaptation — still running — and movie sequels. Beyoncé has a voice role in the new version as the brave, conscientious lioness Nala; she also, of course, sings on the soundtrack.

On the official soundtrack album, Beyoncé joins in a remake of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” the Oscar-winning song that ended the original “Lion King,” and caps the existing soundtrack songs with her new one , “Spirit,” a dynamic secular-gospel exhortation to “Rise up!” Beyoncé wrote and produced “Spirit” with the British producer Labrinth and with Ilya Salmanzadeh, a member of Max Martin’s Swedish songwriting stable; it’s also on “The Gift.”

Image Each song on “The Lion King: The Gift” is a coalition, almost always a trans-Atlantic one.

But “The Gift” goes much further. With Beyoncé as executive producer and a songwriter and performer on most of its tracks, it’s essentially an alternative soundtrack album, tied to the plot of “The Lion King” (and interspersed with dialogue snippets) but decidedly more Afrocentric and more attuned to women’s strengths and experiences.