(The views expressed in this blog post are not representative of the other contributors of Completely Unnecessary on account of The Lion King being the best movie ever. -Theo)
I’m not going to lie to you internet: I don’t like The Lion King. I’m not saying it’s a bad movie, you might even say it’s a pretty good movie. I dislike it on the grounds that nearly every compliment paid to the movie, the depth and scale of the story, the beautiful animation, the compelling character study, the great songs, etc., is in my eyes an exaggeration of the actual good qualities of the film.
The good
I said what I said and I meant what I said; Lion King is not a bad movie. You have to admire the ambition of the film-makers, telling an epic story for children, utilizing new technology to create a powerful cinematic experience. Scenes like the stampede subtly utilise 3d to create a sense of scale drama and danger. Hans Zimmer skilfully integrates an African feel into his imposing score. The skill of the animation and direction gives the film a feeling of scale, so that Simba’s conflict really feels grand and important. Emotionally the conflict is important; dealing not just with death but with guilt of patricide. This could be the foundation for a great film. My issue is that although the tone of a true epic is creating it doesn’t have the intellectual background to support the tone. This is not meant to be a comedy or a big dumb action movie, so the characterization and theme need to be pretty stellar to support the film. So despite the fact that it is some ways really well put together it doesn’t feel as good as for instance Emperor’s New Groove, whose conflict didn’t need to work for the film to be hilarious.
The Characters
The story fails to be relatable because the characters aren’t believable or sympathetic. Characters are only the most basic archetypes; love interest and moral centre, foppish villain, celebrity comic relief, ect. Nala seems to have little or no personality beyond being strong enough to tell Scar and Simba off. Unlike Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast had, there’s no reason for the characters to like each other. Nala doesn’t have this because she has no character. Mufasa is an unreasonably cool father, with no faults to make him believable nor and depth to his character, Scar has no traits beyond evil laziness and general foppishness, and most of the other characters are comic relief with nothing beyond a role in the story and a comic part to play, normally based on typecasting a comic celebrity.
In the really good Disney movies comedy is something that isn’t just delegated to specific characters. Maurice is a comic relief character but the comedy isn’t just from him, but from his interactions with Gaston, who unlike Scar is a villain whose every action is darkly funny. Like the deplorable gargoyles from The Hunchback of Notre Dame Timon and Pumbaa reek of being put in simply to entertain the really young kids while the rest of the audience is interested in the real plot. This wouldn’t matter if the jokes were funny. But. They. Just. Aren’t.
The argument against this is that each of these characters is only important in relation to Simba as the story is structured as a character study, charting Simba’s growth into a man, uh larger lion. But I would argue that the lack of depth in the supporting cast, who are meant to use their interactions with Simba to give him depth, is part of the problem with Simba’s character. Like the rest of the cast Simba seems to have no traits beyond what the plot requires, which gives him more depth than his fellow players, but still not much. Simba is lazy and playful, and learns to accept responsibility for his actions. These traits could have been used to make an interesting character, but Simba isn’t fleshed out much more than this. We don’t know about his hobbies or habits, nor are given enough information to understand how he views the world in a complex way. Disney tried to make Simba a three-dimensional character, with a backstory, and a view of the world which changes over time, but his view of the world is a simply as, wanting to be king, then not caring about anything, then caring about his country.
The visuals
Given this it’s not suprising that the character fail to show off the characters. One of the defining features of good character design is to make characters features efficiently convey to the viewer who that character is. In Beauty and the Beast, even before we see how they move we can see the Belle is beautiful modest and clever, where Gaston is arrogant handsome and inconsiderate. Whereas in Lion King we can tell that Simba is… a Lion, and Nala is… another lion, and Mufasa is… a larger lion. I suppose we could infer that Rafiki is wise because he looks kind of like a racist vision of a witch doctor, if you squint.
Even the better designs only convey the broadest archetypical traits; Scar and the hyenas are evil, and Timon and Pumbaa are the comic relief. By contrast you can tell a lot about Bagheera, Baloo just by how they look. For instance we can tell that Baloo is the big oafish fun-loving one and Bagheera is more physically diminutive but more classy and serious.
The Music
It also doesn’t really work as a musical, and I would question the choice to make it one. Of all the songs in the movie only “Be Prepared” really holds up, despite how well-remembered “Just Can’t Wait to be King”, and “Hakuna Matata” are neither is really a great song. “Circle of Life” works mainly on the strength of Hans Zimmer’s orchestration, but I feel as if it actually becomes worse when the singing begins. Not only that the songs don’t tell the story in the same way they do in other Disney musicals. “Be Prepared” establishes that Scar is evil and wants to overthrow the king, but doesn’t have the depth of “Gaston”, or “Poor Unfortunate Souls”, which each act as way to establish not just the villains scheme but how it relates to their personality. We learn how Gaston is too proud to let Belle go, his views on gender, his compulsive need to be the best but also his views on what makes someone good, and his station in the town; just as we learn about Ursula’s views on body image, her need get revenge on king Triton, her lying and manipulative habits, and her snobbish view of unfortunate people. Similarly “Just Can’t Wait to be King”, doesn’t encourage us to imagine the protagonist as complexly “Belle”, and “Part of Your World” does. The Disney musicals after Howard Ashman died really suffer without the depth and pathos his lyrics gave the characters. I feel as if Lion King was only a musical by default, rather than being as conceptually bound with the format as the other renaissance movies were.
What’s with the Circle of Life
Maybe I would still like the film if all the characters did was carry big complicated ideas on their shoulders, but Hamlet this ain’t. And clearly this was the goal of the movie, what with basing it off Shakespeare and the use of epic cinematography and characters loudly espousing their ideology. Let’s try to reconstruct what this film is about.
So Mufasa tells Simba about the Circle of Life: where it’s okay that bad things happen because that’s life. So when Mufasa dies (spoilers I guess), Simba runs away from it rather than accepting it like a man. Timon and Pumbaa tell him he doesn’t need to worry about it and can stay a child forever, but eventually Simba learns to accept that Mufasa’s death was his fault and that it’s all part of the Circle of Life, right? I assume the idea is that Scar, is somehow also running away from his responsibilities, which by some cosmic process causes a draught.
He’s gunning for you
This is highly problematic. Firstly this gives us no motivation to dislike the villains. Why should we dislike Scar, he feeds off Mufasa’s death just as Lions feed off antelopes? Why are the hyenas bad; they feed off corpses just like everyone else? The fact that we see no visible reason for Scar’s reign to destroy the Pridelands is problematic because the story is meant to be about responsibility. Simba spends the whole film avoiding his responsibility in the death of his father but when he returns he doesn’t have to take responsibility because it turns out that Scar was the one that killed him anyway.
Quite apart from the fact that the idea of The Circle of Life is obviously not applicable in real life, I mean you should really avoid death, death is bad, so is killing, it’s just inconsistent with the rest of the film. What really happened is that Disney stole the structure of Hamlet, is okay they’re not the first, and put some random neo-pagan mystical philosophising in the beginning which sounds really impressive. But the actual structure and content of the story are still based in the medieval concepts of divine right that Hamlet espoused. The Lions are the true kings and by killing the King Lion, and letting the lower beings of the Hyenas into government, Scar, the Claudius Lion, caused an upset in the natural order which meant that a terrible draught happened. The film celebrates the birth of new king because they are the true line of kings and that is why there is a throwaway love interest, so that we know the line of kings continues. Again, a terrible message but the structure of the film makes much more sense this way.
In Summary
What I’m saying is that the film doesn’t work properly on all levels and that these problems are related. In a film like this the epic aesthetic reinforces the large-scale of the story, in terms of ideas but also in space and time. These large themes rest on the characters who are meant to convey the breadth and complexity of life and the philosophies behind it, through their interactions. However the theme can’t feel sophisticated and relevant if the characters don’t interact in an interesting way, or feel like real people. Similarly the animation can’t convey the personality of the characters if the characters have no personality.
So how did this happen?
Well in James Stewart’s book about the Eisner administration at Disney; DisneyWar, he says that Lion King was initially proposed by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the executive in charge of the animation division under Michael Eisner. Stewart says he cried as he proposed the idea to a group of somewhat bemused animators. Stewart’s and other accounts tend to characterise Katzenberg as great at making films successful, and being a ruthless executive, but not really a storyteller. Although some at the time hailed him as the new Disney in retrospect is seems apparent that there was a huge wealth of underutilized talent in Disney animation as the Eisner administration moved in which was allowed to shine as the old guard of animators moved on.
My point is that the production was driven by someone who was not a storyteller, but had a vision for a large-scale story about large-scale ideas. Good animation and direction help the movie considerable but the film is flawed conceptually in that the concept was more to make a big growing up story about a lion king, than about the Circle of Life. At the core the film is about what it wants to be, not about philosophy and society which a film with such an epic and serious tone really should be. All in all the Lion King can only be considered a flawed gem, with big ideas and high production values, but when people tell me that it is one of the best Disney movies, well I must admit I die a little.
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