We Did Not Deserve The Lion King

Concept Art by Lorna Cook

    It has been thirty years since household pets everywhere started resenting Walt Disney Animation.

  In the three decades since The Lion King popularized the ritual of hoisting the nearest small animal up to the heavens against its will, the film has cemented itself as a fixture not just within Disney animation, but pop culture as a whole. The internet has an ongoing culture war with Disney as the cradle of all evil, as seen with something like the bad-faith criticisms of The Disney Princess brand (which I have already talked about), but these conversations tend to skip out on The Lion King. There are some critiques about things like the coding of the hyena characters or the Kimba controversy, but I don't see these weaponized nearly as often, and I see them less as time goes on while the discourse around the movie itself marches on unimpeded. (We can speculate why movies like The Little Mermaid or Cinderella are subjected to more scrutiny than a movie like The Lion King, but we can imagine it has something to do with gender ...)

    At the time, The Lion King soared to the second highest-grossing film of all time just behind Jurassic Park. (For reference, even Frozen only landed at number 5.) The film spawned a hit Broadway show with a following that almost surpasses that of the film on which it is based--a film which, I'll remind you, was the second-highest grossing film of all time.

But what I think is most interesting isn’t just that this film was a tremendous success for Disney, but that it defies a lot of what should make a Disney film a Disney film.

Any Disney movie without a princess will obviously feel aberrant to a certain sect of the internet, but that’s not what I’m talking about. And I also don’t mean actively subversive in the vein of something like Maleficent or even Frozen. The movie is unique in the Disney canon in ways that are only obvious to those who spend a lot of time studying the lineup.

    Here's kind of what I mean:

Basically every Disney film of the 90s centered on some outsider who felt out of place (e.g. a mermaid who wanted to walk on land or a human raised among gorillas). The Lion King does not. Basically every Disney film of the 90s brought in Alan Menken to write the songs and score for the film. The Lion King did not. (Also, Mulan.) The Disneyland character lineup is dominated by characters from this period of Disney history like Ariel and Aladdin. The easiest “Lion King” character to take pictures with at Disneyland I guess is Rafiki. From its basic design, The Lion King feels so different from the kind of movie that Disney was putting out during what was effectively their most lucrative period in its history, like the studio was getting interference from some other channel and accidentally broadcasted this movie from some other dimension.

  What, for example, is our main character’s “I Want” song?

            The closest thing we get is probably “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King.” This is Simba sharing his mindset with the audience early on within the narrative, but it doesn’t quite feel right to call it his “Part of Your World,” his “Over the Rainbow.” There’s a difference in tone, for one thing, but I’d also say it’s different in function. For most of the film, Simba’s relationship to his royal destiny is one of denial and avoidance—he just can’t wait to not be King—and if we were going for a more character-centric songbook, it would be more fitting to give adult Simba a number about feeling directionless without his homeland and his father (which incidentally, the Broadway adaptation does).

             Like most of the film’s musical numbers, “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” is more a reflection of the movie’s theme, and how Simba relates to it at a specific moment, rather than peeling away the curtain and letting the protagonist say the things he doesn’t know how to in dialogue. That’s not to say this is a lesser choice, in this way something like "The Circle of Life" has a lot in common with something like the title song from The Sound of Music, but it does represent a creative shift in the function of music within the Disney library. This makes sense. Elton John, Tim Rice, and Lebo M had a different style for musical storytelling than Menken, and frankly, I think that's okay. 

    There are a ton of small but significant deviations like this that make The Lion King a bit of an outlier within the Disney catalogue. And yet, this outlier became not only one of the studio’s biggest hits, it remains a popular cultural touchstone to this day, and probably would even without the backing of the Walt Disney Company. It wouldn’t be until Toy Story 3, sixteen years later, that another animated film outgrossed it at the box office. The films that immediately followed The Lion King all had their own strengths and high points, but their flaws gradually grew more glaring. From here on out, Disney’s aim drifted away from discovering what animation could achieve and more toward imitating past successes, perfecting the Disney formula.

             It’s worth noting that The Lion King also dropped right around a lot of external factors came around and changed how things came together at Disney. These included the death of Frank Wells, (president of the Walt Disney Company), and the departure of Jeffrey Katzenberg (studio chairman). This was also in the wake of the death of Howard Ashman, whose insight into animated and musical storytelling is such an integral part of what brought Disney back to its emotional center. But most of what sets The Lion King apart in the Disney canon has less to do with left field pitches such as these and more to do with the ways the creative team was allowed to grow the film--not as a future "Disney Classic," but as its own entity, which inevitably gave us the classic-est Disney Classic of them all.

    There's naturally a lot to discuss with a movie like The Lion King, but what I want to focus on mostly is how it either quietly subverts expectations of a Disney film or else how its unique development shaped its unique product, and the lenses through which I am choosing to accomplish this are those of writing, visual storytelling, and tone.

 

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Concept Painting by Don Moore

             Various players at Disney will disagree on who exactly came up with the idea for The Lion King, but by the early 90s, Jeffrey Katzenberg (Chairman, Walt Disney Animation), Michael Eisner (CEO), and Frank Wells (President, Walt Disney company) were actively playing with the idea of doing an animated film with an all-animal cast set in the African savannah. This basic idea would go through various iterations before landing on the film we know today—we’ll get to that. But the interesting thing to me about The Lion King is that when Disney put this movie into production, they were not really expecting it to be that successful.

    While Eisner certainly never would have greenlit a film that he thought would lose money, the creatives behind The Lion King were not handed a project that was expected to leave any impact, and certainly not to the degree it achieved. Even at the time, upper management had zeroed in on Pocahontas as the real money maker, while “King of the Jungle” was thought to be a more sleeper hit.

We can assume that Eisner and Katzenberg were really tickled after Beauty and the Beast became the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture and decided that by synergizing the Disney aesthetic with something like Dances with Wolves, they could clinch a proper win for the studio and brag to all their friends. Pocahontas was going to be that movie. The Lion King was going to be, “whatever, Aladdin made money, so we can afford to bring a lion into the studio for artists to draw, and maybe we can use any profits to buy new hats for the figures on Pirates of the Caribbean.”

    The sentiment within the Disney workforce at the time was very similar. Pocahontas was the movie that animators were excited to work on, and all the A-list animators like Glen Keane committed to working on that project, while “King of the Jungle” was left in the dust. The directors have described the experience of going around the studio and more or less beg people to please work on their movie. In the end, the crew that worked on The Lion King consisted mostly of new talent who were just happy to be here and nuts like Andreas Deja who just really liked drawing animals. (Deja has many times cited The Jungle Book as the film that really made him want to go into animation, and this seemed to him a chance to do what he’d always wanted to do.)

    In the words of co-director, Roger Allers, "I think it gave an opportunity for a lot of young animators who hadn’t had a chance to lead a character. So they were fired up to do a good job -- it was quite an inclusive and creative circle. Everyone was listened to. When it came to fruition and everyone could see the message it was putting out and the heart the movie had that went on to be embraced by the audience.... it was very gratifying."

             The fact that Disney was more or less split into two different factions shows in the final product in the way that The Lion King feels so different from the Disney films of the time. And because the movie had less investment from the higher-ups, the artists were subject to much less studio meddling. This is partially what allowed for these highly artistic storybeats like Mufasa reappearing to Simba in the sky and urging him to be the lion he is meant to be.

      These differences built to a more stylistically different movie, and in this way, it helped elevate the Disney library as a whole. It showed that even a film that does not feel as commercially viable can still really resonate with audiences, which can also translate to tremendous financial rewards: it showed Disney that there was more than one way to do “Disney.” 

             History made the showdown between The Lion King and Pocahontas seem really, really flimsy. While Pocahontas certainly has elements of inspiration, The Lion King handily went down as the film with more cultural impact, and I don’t think that’s some wild coincidence. Pocahontas was designed to achieve a specific result—to perfect a process. The Lion King was made because animators wanted to spread their wings. (We could also go into other aspects of the Pocahontas experiment, like to what extent the film was or wasn’t helpful in things like the representation of Native Americans, but that’s probably better suited for another day.)

 

Writing and Visual Storytelling

One element of the development of this movie that is often underdiscussed is that The Lion King came out in a time where animated films were starting to move more toward a standard Hollywood screenplay format and away from the more traditional method for animation.

    Until the days of the early Disney renaissance, animated films were developed entirely through storyboards without anything like a written screenplay to build off of. The dialogue, action, and even character expression were conceived hand-in-hand. This allows most of the storytelling to progress through visuals, strictly through what you see on screen. This harkens all the way back to the early days of silent film, which imparted basically all their story with pure visual storytelling. This method allows the audience to react to the story in a way that is more visceral, more emotional, and more personal.

    Screenplays, meanwhile, lend themselves more to spoken word, progressing the narrative through character dialogue and screen direction. It's not necessarily as simple as just having characters literally reciting the plot with words, but the mark of a good screenplay is generally thought to be a powerful turn of phrase, and so that is where the attention of the artist falls. This also has roots in the history of the medium. Once sound became a part of the experience, cinema largely deflected to other text-driven mediums like theater and the novel as sources of inspiration and often adaptation.

    Good storytellers obviously know how to employ both with whatever method they’re using. Many of the most affecting movies of all time are notable for how they meaningfully use the visual language of film to impart meaning. Citizen Kane, for example, does a lot to communicate to the audience both the overwhelming enormity of Kane’s empire and also its hollowness largely through the visuals, through all the vast empty space surrounding this titan of industry. But it’s also essential to understand the inherent strengths of each medium, and how they affect the development of the story and the way the audience interacts with it.  

Jeffrey Katzenberg came into the studio from a background of live-action filmmaking, and he basically wanted to run Disney animation in that same way, and a part of that meant movement toward developing a screenplay before moving toward any kind of storyboarding. You really started to see Disney commit to the format with something like Aladdin which incorporates a screenplay with great precision and to great effect. The narrative turning points all clock in right on schedule for a Joseph Campbell-style hero’s journey format. And this is more or less the standard for how animated films are developed today: script first, drawing later. The Lion King caught Disney at a point of transition in which the studio was still drinking from both fountains.

Whereas storyboarded films tended to come together sequence by sequence, developing with a screenplay makes it much easier to delineate a story’s development across multiple distinguishable drafts. This gives the filmmakers the opportunity to look at a story as a complete whole before either putting it into production or giving it another go. There were, lowballing it, at least four different iterations of the “King of the Jungle Story” between 1988 and when production began earnestly in 1992.

Story Sketches by Chris Sanders

    In 1988, short story writer, Tom Disch (readers might know him best as the author of The Brave Little Toaster), was commissioned to write a treatment for “The King of Kalahari.” Many of the elements that would survive into the final film were visible in that early draft, including Bobo the mandrill, a sort of ancestor for Timon, Pumbaa, and even Rafiki. (This draft also had a plot point featuring a herd of friendly elephants that tragically did not make it into The Lion King.) The basic outline of the story—main hero lives in lion land, gets banished, grows up, then returns to take his home back—was present all the way from this first draft by Disch.

             The character name of “Simba” was introduced in Jenny Tripp’s 1990 draft, which also introduced the idea of Simba making friends with two non-lion characters while in exile. At varying points, the character that became Scar was an evil jackal and in another he was the king of the baboons. Eventually, they figured out that the story was strongest when Simba’s dark mirror was also a lion. And to underline the Shakespearean-ness of it all, they made him Simba’s uncle. But what we know as “The Lion King” really came into focus around 1992 when we would land on our final screenwriters, Irene Mecchi and Johnathan Roberts, their screenplay is dated as being completed on August 20, 1993.

Concept Painting by Kevin Yasuda

    Some within Disney, like Linda Woolverton, one of the screenwriters, really embraced working from an established screenplay, while others, like directors Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, preferred the older method of developing story through drawing. This reportedly created some tension for the animators for this film. At one point, Deja basically told the directors he wasn’t putting drawing anything else until they knew for sure what scenes were going to be in the movie and which weren’t. 

    But one byproduct of this was an animated film that benefited from both methods of crafting story. You see this particularly in the way that characters were developed. The stars of Walt’s time, like Mowgli and Wendy, obviously have clear starting and ending points, but they stand in as more broad tokens of how everyone feels about leaving behind childhood. Simba's journey obviously has universal elements, but his thought processes get to be a little more textured, and in that way, they feel more specific to Simba as a character. 

Simba's character dilemma can be discerned through verbal interactions, like the dialogue he has with Timon and Pumbaa about the great kings of the past that his father would tell him about ... and in the crass response Simba's friends have to him sharing a very personal part of himself. Simba never literally tells the audience "This makes me feel displaced as a character," but that information is still being provided to the audience through the words the characters are saying. Concurrently, this movie's deference to visual storytelling also gives us things like young Simba falling into his father’s giant footstep and seeing just how small he fits into it by comparison. That is powerful storytelling with no dialogue. 

    This clever use of pantomime is further bolstered by the film leaning on the visuals of this story’s locale, in the majesty of the African savannah. The Circle of Life number is a really solid example of this. That the sequence serves no narrative purpose, that its function is purely poetic, emotional, thematic, makes it that much more striking. Unless you’re one of those nerds who loves studying Disney (don’t worry, you’re among friends), you probably have to google the actual lyrics for Circle of Life, but the sequence itself leaves such an impact just through the sheer force of the images present, the snapshots of the African wildlife all assembling across this rich landscape. And, as in The Sound of Music, that tribute to nature and all its majesty isn’t just incidental. It says something about the story: this is about something timeless, something as immoveable as nature itself. One of the films songwriters, and vocalist at the start of Circle of Life, Lebo M, has described the experience of bringing this number to life, saying, 

"It was a period in my life where I was returned to South Africa from a life in exile and everything about that movie — thematically, lyrically, emotionally and spiritually — I could relate to … What you hear in the film is what I did the first time in the demo track. We did many more takes, of course, but the first one sounded so authentic.”

           This poetic blend of image and music is largely what accounts for such an impactful opening sequence. That thin veneer of fantasy you get through animation is what makes this film work, and you can feel the difference in, say, the lifelessness of this film’s live-action remake. That version reached for grandeur by leaning hard into realism, but it only makes the whole enterprise seem that much more jarring and dissonant. You put a bunch of unsmiling photorealistic animals in one space, and I suddenly start wondering why all these critters aren’t gnawing on each other.

    Because the film lets the emotions lead the way in terms of how and when plot is developed, you get a plot that almost seems to exist out of time. Plot points are not metered out according to how long they “should” take. Its answers to the purely emotional side of the storytelling. 

    The inciting incident of the film, Simba fleeing the Pridelands, comes at about the 40-minute mark, which is really late for a 90-minute film. (I guarantee you, if this film had been made today, that would absolutely be a sticking point for amateur YouTube film critics fresh out of Screenwriting 101.) A lot of that extra time in Act I is spent establishing motifs, relationships, and themes from which the remainder of the film will draw. The exit from ACT I to ACT II falls at a similar runtime for epic films like DUNE or Avatar, but those are also much longer movies, and their second and third acts are proportionally larger.

On paper, this feels tilted--how on Earth did this kid have an entire character arc in 25 minutes--but in execution, it still works. The narrative turning points, and what they mean for Simba’s character progression, do not feel underdeveloped by the time the film starts cashing in on all its pieces: we know what it means for Simba to go back to the Pridelands and confront Scar. We have felt all the feelings to understand what's at stake here, physically and emotionally. The audience has gone through all the necessary steps to emotionally buy into what the film is selling. 

    The Lion King can get away with this in large part owing to the boost of more emotional storytelling. The film owes this partly to the nature of animation, but also to the workings of musical film: Simba’s character turn would be really hard to pull off without "Hakuna Matata." He goes from this package of trauma to a carefree lazy-boy in all of three minutes of screentime, even before the in-universe time jump. But this only works if the song advances the characters or the story, and that is why the songs in Disney musicals, at least the good Disney musicals, are so phenomenal. It’s not just that they’re catchy; they carry immensely heavy loads.

             As a point of comparison, Disney released a few animated films in the 2000s with some passing tonal similarities to The Lion King; namely, Treasure Planet and Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Both films have solid underground followings within the larger Disney fandom, especially if you came of age with these DVDs in your collection, but they never reached the zeitgeist in the way that 90s Disney movies did. I’ve long held that a large part of what holds these films back from their potential is that they simply try to stuff way too much plot into 85 minutes of film. This compromises the development of things like character relationships, plot escalations, and so on, things that The Lion King doesn’t have to worry about as much because a well-executed musical number can cut right to the emotional or thematic core of a story far more efficiently than simple dialogue.

           I’m not saying that all the problems of those two movies would have been solved if they’d just been musicals. Their stories were more of the action-adventure variety. They advanced the plot not with the same emotional revelations spurred on by song, but with the problem-solving flow more inherent to the genre. They didn’t necessarily need musical numbers to compress the time, they needed a larger canvas to give their quests more room to breathe. Though, I do think it is worth noting that the most memorable and impactful moments within either film (e.g. “I’m Still Here” or the Crystal Chamber segment) make heavy use of the interplay between visual and emotion and almost behave like little musical numbers themselves.

             While it’s not like animation as an artform ever completely lost touch with the emotional side of things, I feel like there was a cost in moving away from this more sensory-guided method of storytelling. Part of what makes The Lion King so special is that it gets to have it both ways: richly psychological and also deeply emotional.

 

Tone (or if you’d prefer, the Timon and Pumbaa section)

I feel comfortable in declaring that this is one of Disney’s heaviest films. Even Bambi didn’t force the kid (or the audience) to behold the mother’s final moments onscreen. But it’s not just the darkness or the trauma of it all. There’s a majesty to something like the “King of Pride Rock” score that feels rich and soaring and speaks to the film’s emotional ambition. Makes sense, this was a time when Disney animation was actively trying to show the world it could be as legitimate as "real movies." Hence, this is one of Disney’s heaviest films. 

And yet, this is also a movie in which one of the main characters has a flatulence problem.

 For a lot of audiences, this disparity doesn't even cross their mind. "It's a Disney movie. They could be making a movie about the bubonic plague, and there would still be goofy sidekicks." But I don't think it's as simple as Disney needing to sell toys. The Lion King's immediate successors, Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, made similar attempts to house comical characters within much more grounded, serious stories, but they pulled it off less gracefully, and I think it's worth exploring why it is that no one talks about Timon and Pumbaa ruining such a serious movie.

Star Wars (1977)

   While the loveable sidekick has been a mainstay within Disney since day one, it should be noted that clowns have existed within epic stories for a long time. If you go all the way back to the likes of John Ford Westerns and Akira Kurosawa samurai flicks, you run into the small players who just kind of wandered into these worlds of giants and stop the vibes from ever getting too dire. Further still, Shakespeare’s tragedies often had comedic characters (e.g. the Nursemaid in Romeo & Juliet.) They often occupied lower stations than the protagonists, who are basically always nobility, and so they were not bound to the same expectations of behavior, which allows them to say and do things that would detract from the gravitas of the story if performed by more central characters. These guys may move along the plot incidentally or carry some unappreciated wisdom, but their truest function is to let the audience come up for air and give them some much-earned laughs between all the brooding and somberness of the plot.

Neither critics nor filmmakers have been shy about the influence of Shakespeare on The Lion King. Most are pretty quick to catch onto the parallels between The Lion King and Hamlet, as one example. But the Shakespeare work that I think is most useful to understanding what make "Lion King" uniquely great is actually one of his lesser-celebrated works, The Winter’s Tale. If your English class didn’t go over that one, that’s fine. But The Winter’s Tale is noteworthy in the Shakespeare canon in that it blends both tragic and comedic devices, and in this way, it becomes a nice window into how we understand tonal shifts.

    One of the first things that Shakespeare scholars tend to note about this work is that there is a sharp divide between the two halves. The first part is much more psychological and somber, more in line with his tragic works like Othello or MacBeth. The second half has a much merrier feel to it, akin to his comedic works like A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Much Ado About Nothing. But these two opposing tones exist as deliberate complementary agents within the story’s thematic development.

To give a very brief overview of a very intricate plot, "The Winter's Tale" sees a jealous king who makes a mess of things when he suspects his loving wife of sleeping with his best friend. The accusation brings about a whole range of tragedy, and the drama of it all actually causes both the king’s young son and the queen to die of grief, the queen giving birth to a daughter just before her apparent death. The daughter is taken away where her father can’t hurt her, and the king has a serious coming to a Jesus moment where realizes he has royally screwed up.

Sixteen years later, the daughter has been raised in some pastoral shepherd-land and fallen in love with a prince, but his parents don’t approve of their marriage. This prompts the young lovers to seek out the king of their neighboring nation and ask for his help, the daughter unaware of her royal heritage. They implore the king, secrets get revealed, and the king realizes that this is his child. Father and daughter reunite, the young lovers have their union blessed, and also the queen emerges from hiding and basically tells her husband that she pretended to be dead all these years so he could work on himself, but now that he’s done being a jerk, they can be married again. And they all lived happily ever after.

    Again, two halves with two different vibes. Like The Lion King, The Winter's Tale is a story with deep questions about human failure, and it also a fun little romp with a comforting ending. The tonal divide in The Lion King isn't as sharp as it is in The Winter's Tale, but in both stories the two tones are also localized across two different spheres. The space in which Shakespeares's little love story blossoms feels very mindfully different from the space in which the king’s pride cost him his entire family. These two halves take shape not only in entirely different geographical spaces, but in emotionally and visually contrasting ones as well. The kinds of people that populate either world are very different. This second half, for example, introduces Autolycus, a street performer and pick-pocket who does exactly what you’d expect a comic relief character to do in this story. We see him before we see the young lovers whose romance will dominate the second half of the story, and so he basically sets the tone for this world and the people we will find there.

Already we can get a sense for what Timon and Pumbaa bring to the table. Their introduction isn’t just incidental. When Simba encounters them, he has sort of turned his back on his kingly duties and the regality that entails. Hence, his world becomes a lot more lighthearted. Zazu fills a similar sort of function as a source of comedy within the first half of the film as a sort of punching bag for the young cubs, but he is still a representative of regality and punctiliousness, and in this way feels like an extension of Pride Rock. When Timon and Pumbaa storm onto the scene, we know we’re not in Kansas anymore. You feel what it means for Simba to exit from this domain of kings and circles of life in how different Simba the world feels when he lives with them. Simba is also not living up to his potential when he is with them, something we the audience kind of gain seeing the dissonance of this regal apex predator slurping caterpillars with his buddies.

The thing that separates Timon and Pumbaa from the gargoyles of "Hunchback" isn't quite as straightforward as just not showing up as often, but I think that timing has a lot to do with it. Not all situations can be improved with a wisecrack. You need to be conscious of what effect your comedy is having on your story and when the tone needs to be dropped down a peg. The Lion King wrangles a lot of tones--majestic and crass, sobering and comical--because the tone of any given scene mirrors the needs of the specific moment, always in the service of the larger story.

    One thing that really makes Timon and Pumbaa work in execution is that the film itself still casts these two bums as genuine allies for Simba. Even if Simba will have to learn to cast off their "Hakuna Matata" mindset, they are still there for him when he needs someone to tell him he’s not unwanted. And when Simba does have to return home to face his demons, they follow him right into the fire. They take their goofiness with them to this more somber sphere, as seen with something like their impromptu luau performance, but even here their comical bits are inserted at very precise moments within the action where they won't obscure the stakes or lower the tension.

Again, it’s difficult to pull off in practice, and part of the reason why the joke lands in this film is probably because Timon and Pumbaa come from a long line of comedic sidekicks in animated films, so the audience already has some context for what these guys are doing here. I don’t think Disney was just surprised when Timon and Pumbaa plushies started lining the shelves.

But at the same time, to call their contribution to the story purely toyetic is ignoring their context within the story. I think that is how a lot of spectators and imitators perceived them (much in the same way that animation companies saw Robin Williams in Aladdin and thought, “Oh? So casting just any celebrity in an animated film is automatically going to work? That’s the trick?”) but the purpose of these two wisecracking, flatulating animals is not auxiliary at all. They are agents of crafting theme and meaning within the text of the film they occupy. 

    And this is ultimately the secret of any of those millions of plushable Disney sidekicks, at least the good ones. Yes, Olaf in Frozen is here to draw in the kids, but he is also the mouthpiece for the sort of childhood innocence and carefreeness that has been denied these sisters who have grown up in the shadow of trauma. Olaf plays a huge role in helping Anna and Elsa find that again, and a part of the way he accomplishes that is by being very huggable. His specific purpose is different than Timon and Pumbaa's--makes sense, he exists within a different story than Timon or Pumbaa--but Frozen without Olaf would not be as strong for reasons that have way more to do with theme than some critics would want to believe.

You also see how Disney’s imitators fail to pull this off so gracefully, and this is a part of why no one cares about Quest for Camelot or any of the other million Disney cash-ins of the late 90s. They didn’t bother to ask what these merchandisable little guys brought to the table, they just imitated something they didn’t bother to understand.

And that’s kind of the dark shadow of The Lion King and Disney Animation as a purveyor of culture. When studios looked at The Lion King and its buckets of money and asked, "How can we get that again?", no one thought Shakespeare. They thought "toys."

The King Has Returned

With all these essays, I generally try to look at the film from a broad, even timeless, perspective. I want these essays to feel accessible to readers if they encounter them five, ten, twenty years down the road. That said, I can’t help but view The Lion King and its milestone specifically in the context of Walt Disney Animation’s recent speed bumps, even more specifically in the context of the crash landing of Wish, a film that tried so hard to reduce Disney magic to a set list of plot points and external criteria, and the end result lacks any real magic of its own.

    Yes, I understand that Wish was meant to be like a pastiche of Disney-mythology, and I get that it was supposed to commemorate 100 years of Disney. But I also feel like there are reasons why people still like Enchanted where the world did not take to Wish. Because it’s not just that the film has a lot of visual homage to movies like Pinocchio or Sleeping Beauty. The tone of the humor, the style of the dialogue, even the way characters are designed, they all feel like they were okayed by a committee, not storytellers. This could have been the Stranger Things of Disney animation, but what we got was Disney Lite.

The goat in Wish, for example, has a fixation on butts and flatulence that feels lifted right from Pumbaa, but the necessary context that makes Pumbaa’s observations on balls of gas ironic isn’t there. It tries to coast on the assumption that “it’s a kids movie, fart jokes will always be funny,” and so the joke falls very, very flat. Disney also chose to employ a songwriting team that had not only never worked for Disney before, but had never written songs for a musical story. I guess Disney really will do anything to avoid bringing back Alan Menken. Though honestly, I doubt even he could have salvaged a movie where the story elements were so poorly thought out and misshapen. Things like magic systems and even character motivations feel half-baked and confused, hardly a good foundation for a memorable story. While I don’t think Wish was the total disaster some commentators have made it out to be, the movie had structural issues which made for a compromised final product.

    Way back when we talked about Tangled as the film that helped Disney retrace its steps, we talked a lot about how the film returned to storytelling devices and signposts that audiences were familiar with. But a couple of things to note: First, Tangled implemented a lot of Disney trademarks, but it did not try to coast on them. General storytelling practices like character motivation and setup/payoff were employed so that the movie would stand on its own. Second, Tangled offered storytelling points that were unique unto themselves. Same with The Little Mermaid, same with Cinderella. Same with every good Disney movie.

Disney seems to think that "Lion Kings" come out to roar when they snag a formula that can be repeated and perfected, but they forget that arguably their crowning achievement was not a movie that was "supposed" to break records. The Lion King was not great because it fit neatly into the kinds of stories Disney was used to telling. It was great because it represented Disney trying new things. The common ancestor between all the Disney landmarks has never been as straightforward as a set list of tropes or character types or even methods of production. It has been creating that space where audiences can let down their guard and revel in that precious space between truth and imagination. And as this movie demonstrates, there's more than one way to do that. 

    Anyways, I hope this essay feels really dated really soon. I hope that Disney has a lot more The Lion Kings on its way.

            --The Professor