THE LION KING

The Lion King

Grade: A

At one time, The Lion King was my absolute favorite movie in the world.

I saw The Lion King in theaters in 1994, when I was six years old. I vividly remember whispering to my mom, post-wildebeest stampede, “he’s just sleeping, right?” as Simba approached Mufasa prone body at the bottom of the gorge, and hearing her gently respond “I think he’s dead”. And then, post-movie, I just know my mind was blown. For years, I collected African animal figures and beanie babies, watched National Geographic specials about lions and hyenas, and just LOVED the movie. Undoubtedly, at one time, The Lion King was a bigger deal to me than Game of Thrones or Star Wars ever will be.

Of course, that was a long time ago. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen The Lion King overall, but it’s surely more than twenty (I come from a Disney-loving family, and I have three younger siblings, so we’ve gotten around to watching the Disney classics a time or two). What I do know is I saw it enough times that I soon came to kind of resent it, just because I was too familiar with it, everyone I knew was too familiar with it and loved it, and I started to think it was overrated. Maybe I was embarrassed by how much I liked it and how many times I watched it. I’ve had similar overexposure backlashes to movies since, including Titanic, Jurassic Park, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (well, okay, I still don’t think that’s a very good movie), The Patriot, Saving Private Ryan, Avatar, and even The Lord of the Rings at times—all movies I have become all-consumed with for chunks of time. In recent years, whenever I’ve discussed Disney movies with people, and talked favorites, and people have mentioned The Lion King among their very favorites, I have all but rolled my eyes and thought to myself “how quaint”. It has been a long time since I’ve listed it among my favorites (for the record, I still say my top two cartoon Disney animated films are The Beauty and the Beast and Tarzan).

On a Disney kick of late, I bought The Lion King on Blu-Ray today, and sat down to watch it. I am not joking when I say I hadn’t watched it in at least ten years, maybe even fifteen.

And I loved it from start to finish. I laughed, I almost cried, I had chills, I sang along to the musical numbers, and I cheered when the closing title came up at the credits.

What’s always great about rewatching movies you saw many times as a child is how you perceive it differently. If my as-a-child perception of The Lion King was accurate, the movie would probably be about two-and-a-half hours long, an EPIC, with the wildebeest stampede occurring probably an hour in, and Simba and Scar having a fifteen-minute-long climactic battle. That’s not how it is. The Lion King is only 88 minutes long, including credits. Barely an hour-and-fifteen-minutes elapses between the famous opening African chant “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba” and the final BOOM as the closing title comes up.

What’s amazing, in rewatching The Lion King, is not just how NOT epic-length it is, but how there is barely a wasted second in that run-time. Today, even animated kids films are closer to two hours than one hour. But in The Lion King—arguably the peak of the “Disney Renaissance”, an era in which Disney flexed its muscles and really perfected its formula—you pretty much go from big scene to big scene to big scene, with little connective tissue. This is perhaps most obvious when Simba first meets Timon and Pumbaa in the desert, he’s woken, Timon makes his jokes about the food chain, and then comes the “Hakuna Matata--what a wonderful phrase”, and characters Simba met about two minutes of screen time ago are suddenly his best friends, winning him over by mid-song. If this were a different kind of movie, or maybe just a different movie I was enjoying less and had less of a nostalgic attachment to, I would mind.  Hey, where’s all the character development and subtle moments?!?! Says the obnoxious wannabe film critic. The movie is quickly-paced, and the classic songs “Circle of Life”, “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King”, “Be Prepared” and “Hakuna Matata” all occur within forty-five minutes of the opening, with “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” soon after. And the climactic confrontation between Simba and Scar takes places just minutes after Simba returns to the pridelands, and resolves within another small handful of minutes, and the movie’s over about three minutes later.

And yet I didn’t mind, because I was too busy smiling and singing along and going “Dang, no wonder this was always considered the peak of Disney’s peak period!”

I’m not gonna summarize the plot or what I liked or didn’t like (there’s not much of the latter, anyway). Just gonna throw a few bullet points out there and then go. Man was that good!

§  The Lion King’s animation is so amazing. From the gorgeous, epic sweep of the animals gathering during the opening “Circle of Life”, to the unbelievable wildebeest stampede (which a friend recently told me Disney worked on for three full years), to Simba’s vision of Mufasa coming down to him in the clouds, is just incredible.

o   One REALLY amazing thing I never noticed: in the adult Simba’s face, you can totally see both the young Simba and Mufasa. It’s not just that they look similar (yellow lions with red manes)—you can see Mufasa’s features in there. That’s pretty incredible for a drawing.

§  As with almost every movie you rewatch as an adult that you saw as a child, there’s so much more in the dialogue than I ever realized. Scar’s early line to Mufasa “you’ve come down to mingle with us commoners” was one I did not remember ever hearing, and it made me chuckle. Nor were adult Simba’s repeated utterances of “it’s my fault, it’s my fault” when reflecting on his father’s death. And there was at least one by Timon that I can’t remember now, which frustrates me.

o   This is even true of the songs, it turns out. I had always thought Timon’s early line to Pumba in the dialogue leading up to “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” was “they’ll fall in love, and here’s the bottom line: our trio’s down the tube”. Never realized till I just watched it that it’s actually “our trio’s down to two”, made easy because he holds up two fingers. I’m dumb.

§  All the big songs are freakin’ irresistible. I’m 29 and watched it by myself just now, and I was singing aloud to parts of “I Just Can’t Wait To Be King”, “Be Prepared”, “Hakuna Matata” and “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”. No question. Including the Elton John album version of the latter, The Lion King definitely has one of the most impressive and enjoyable line-ups of songs, even in Disney’s tremendous songbook.

§  Scar is an incredible character. Cruel, horrible, awful, of course, but incredible. Understanding as an adult all his snarky asides, I’m just amazed at what a well-written, expressive, and hideously-evil character he is, and I gotta say Jeremy Irons’ vocal performance is up there with Robin Williams’ Genie, and Minnie Driver’s Jane as one of the liveliest and most engaging ever in Disney’s cartoons.

o   Also, I gotta say. I always knew Scar was a bad dude, but just realizing what he was up to from the moment we meet him in the movie--the way he obviously schemes to have his brother killed, personally kills him, then tries at least three times to have his nephew killed--he’s horrible. I started thinking during the movie, in terms of motivation and onscreen horrors perpetrated, Scar might only be matched by The Hunchback of Notre Dame’s Claude Frollo as a heinous, just out-and-out evil dude, and possibly Disney’s most hateful villain.

§   Speaking of, can we talk about the horribly realistic and sad way Scar lays a huge, undeserved, personality-and-reality-shattering emotional and psychological burden on Simba by telling him he’s to blame for his father’s death? Sure, in a very, very literal way, he was, because he was in the gorge at the time of the stampede and his father died trying to save him, but, obviously, all was planned and orchestrated (and the death blow struck) by Scar. The heartbreaking way in which the grown Simba, over and over, says “it’s my fault, it’s my fault” when reflecting on his past and his father’s death, and how it is so devastatingly true of many people who are abused or mistreated or go through family tragedies at a young age—that might, in a psychology-studies-way, be The Lion King’s most impressive achievement. How they capture the intense, heart-shattering, all-consuming guilt that is misplaced on young, hurt, searching souls by selfish, hateful, monstrous older figures. It’s astonishing, and heart-breaking, and Scar can’t die enough horrible, just-slightly-off-screen deaths to make me feel better about it. Like I said, Scar’s up there (or down there, if you prefer) with Frollo in the Hall of Fame (Shame) of Disney villains.

§  On a happier note, The Lion King almost certainly has the best set of “animal sidekick characters” of any Disney movie. Obviously, it’s a little different here, because all the characters are animals, but Zazu, Timon, and Pumbaa are all lively, have distinct personalities, and legitimately affect the plot, and not just in amazing-coinkydink ways. The film would suffer if you would removed any of them, which is almost certainly not true of the likes of Abu in Aladdin, Meeko the raccoon in Pocahontas, or the “lucky” cricket in Mulan. These characters weren’t on hand just to enchant kiddies or sell merch. They meant something. The only Disney movie I can think of where the sidekick-type characters are equally-good/not-annoying is The Beauty and the Beast, because, duh, Lumiere, Cogsworth, Mrs. Potts, Chip, even LeFou and the Wardrobe, are all necessities.

§  While watching adult Simba and Nala walk beneath the waterfall and play around in the jungle while the movie version of “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” played, I thought something weird—these two were only friends before, hadn’t seen each other in years, and had only been reunited just minutes/hours before, and yet…sometimes it takes a kids’ movie to point out stuff like this, love doesn’t have to be complicated. Hey, I’m single and I’m definitely not a relationship guru, but I’m just saying. Yeah, it’s not really smart to throw around the word or the idea of love, in a romantic sense, and I do believe these things often take time and you need to be careful, but I suppose love doesn’t have to be this agonizing, hair-pulling-out, over-analyzing, do-you-like-me, or-do-you-like me-like me thing. Love can be simple. You just love somebody, and they love you.

§  And I just gotta go back to the wildebeest stampede. That scene still inspires such a sense of dread and awe, mixed with adrenaline. I almost teared up. In particular, the frames that begin with Simba running frantically while the larger and faster wildebeests come tearing right behind, past, or over top of him, are just spectacular.

Uhhh, I’m sure I could think of more things, but I’m gonna stop there. Bottom line, I had an absolute blast watching The Lion King for the first time in 15-ish years. To me, it definitely deserves its place on the top shelf of Disney cartoons, with Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin and whatever else is considered to be “up there”. And I might even be willing to say, now, that’s my #2 Disney movie, behind The Beauty and the Beast. It’s free of many of the flaws of many of other Disney films (overly-goofy sidekicks, wasted scenes, potty humor, villain who doesn’t really matter except to just “be evil”), it’s very well-paced, the songs are a delight, the characters matter, and it just feels epic. It’s a gorgeous film, and one of Disney’s very best, and I’m so glad I own it now.

THE LION KING (1994)
Directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff

Screenplay by Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts, and Linda Woolverton

Rated G (hard to believe, right, considering some intense material)

Length: 88 minutes

FEATURING THE VOICES OF:  JEREMY IRONS (Scar), JAMES EARL JONES (Mufasa), MATTHEW BRODERICK (Simba), JONATHAN TAYLOR THOMAS (Young Simba), NATHAN LANE (Timon), ERNIE SABELLA (Pumbaa), MOIRA KELLY (Nala), ROWAN ATKINSON (Zazu), ROBERT GUILLAUME (Rafiki), WHOOPIE GOLDBERG (Shenzi), CHEECH MARIN (Banzai), NIKETA CALAME (Young Nala), MADGE SINCLAIR (Sarabi), and JIM CUMMINGS (Ed)