You can often separate your generations out by Disney movies, though it seems a strange thing to do. And one of the movies that was absolutely key for mine happened to be The Lion King.
But here’s the kicker—The Lion King wasn’t intended as a golden egg-laying goose. In fact, it was the unloved cousin that Disney wanted swept under the rug from the outset. It was expected to fail. So for its 20th birthday, here are a few tales, a few behind the scenes gems that make it clear why this odd-ball project that was based on no fairy tale whatsoever became something of a classic.
To begin with, perhaps the most interesting fact of all—this movie was not something Disney was banking on. The hierarchy in the animation division at that point in time went thus: all the best movies were about people. If you got stuck working on the movie about talking animals, good luck, but critical acclaim was not to be yours. So those who were largely considered Disney’s “A-team” were all hard at work during this period… on Pocahontas. The Lion King was basically meant to be a “gap year” piece of filler to give audiences something to watch while the next Disney pet project was still underway.
The connections between the film’s plot and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (an often talked-about influence) were not initially intentional. In earlier drafts of the script, Scar was not Mufasa’s brother—he was a lion without his own pride, who wanted what Mufasa had. Later on in story meetings, it was suggested that they could be related. The writers quickly realized that it gave the story certain parallels to Hamlet and started running wild with it. Apparently they considered going so far as to have Scar say “Goodnight sweet prince,” to Mufasa before letting his brother fall to his death. The next morning everyone, better for some sleep, agreed that it was a terrible idea and they reined in the references.
It is important to note that The Lion King is the first animated feature that Disney created independent of direct source material. Most people who heard of the overall plot scoffed at the idea. But for whatever reason, the people who ended up on their team became utterly dedicated to making it work. The script was overhauled more than once—at one point in time it had no music, and was going to be more of an animated “National Geographic special.” One of the original titles was “King of the Jungle,” scraped when it was finally noted the story took place in the savannah. It was then that The Lion King came into play.
Because the music is one of the defining aspects of The Lion King, there is (unsurprisingly) much to say about its evolution. Elton John and Tim Rice were tapped for the songs and Hans Zimmer for the score. But Zimmer desperately wanted to recruit Lebo M to help him with the music; they had worked together previously on the film The Power of One. Unfortunately Lebo M, a singer and composer who was exiled from his country of South Africa at the time, proved impossible to get a hold of. Zimmer kept trying to leave him messages, but never heard back from the man. Eventually, he got a call from the directors (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff) that they were coming over to see what he had written, and that he needed to have more of the soundtrack finished soon. After the call, his doorbell rang—Lebo M was standing there on his doorstep. Zimmer dragged him indoors and told him about the project.
Lebo M asked Zimmer to explain the plot of the film to him. As Zimmer did so, Lebo M began to write down the basics in Zulu to give himself a reference of word and phrases he might pull into the music. The directors arrived and asked Zimmer about the opening of the film—it was previously agreed that the movie would begin as the sun rose over the pride lands, with a single voice to herald it. Zimmer had Lebo M head into the recording studio he had set up, told him what they were trying to accomplish in that first moment, and asked if he could just riff to see if anything came to him. Lebo M tried many variations, but nothing fit quite right. Zimmer and the directors were beginning to panic over whether they would have the opening number complete in time to screen for the up-and-ups, chatting back and forth about what they might have to do….
Suddenly, Lebo M calls out: “Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba!”
Everyone stops. They all know it without saying a word. That’s it.
Once the opening number was complete, on both the music and animation sides of things, “The Circle of Life” was screened for Mike Eisner, the head of Disney at the time. As the screening ended, Eisner informed the creative team that they’d messed up big time. They asked why and held their breath.
Eisner’s response? “Because now the rest of the film has to be this good.”
He had a good point.
Based solely on the strength of “The Circle of Life,” the initial Lion King trailer was the very first Disney preview that opted to show a single uninterrupted scene rather than cuts of footage. It was a hit with audiences instantly. Fascinatingly, this trailer contained no spoken dialogue whatsoever.
Part of the strenght of Lion King rests on the laurels of some honestly excellent voice talent. From James Earl Jones to Jeremy Irons, the cast had the calibre that audiences had come to suspect from Disney features… but they could have easily ended up with a different set. For instance, Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella were originally called in to audition for two of the hyenas. The actors were in the middle of a run of Guys and Dolls together and were asked to audition side by side, which led to their casting as Timon and Pumba instead. Timon’s unforgettable sidetrack “What do you want me to do—dress in drag and do the hula?” was actually an ad-lib from Lane.
Additionally, the film intended to reunite Cheech and Chong as the two main hyenas, but when scheduling did not permit Tommy Chong’s appearance, one hyena was rewritten as a female. This, of course, resulted in the stellar casting of Whoopi Goldberg as Shenzi.
Because so many Disney films were based on fairy tales and children’s books, it was more common for their backdrops to feature vague Western-style castles or to be set in Europe outright. The Lion King was one of the first films to abandon this entirely, and the first to be inarguably set in Africa. (Aladdin does not quite make the cut—it’s location is unclear, more likely in the Middle East.) Interestingly, though Disney translates many of its films into a variety of languages, The Lion King was the very first (and one of very few in cinema, period) to be translated into Zulu, the language that comprises all of the non-English lyrics in the soundtrack.
But all of these perfect alignments of fate aside, The Lion King has been widely praised for its ability to accurately communicate loss to children. One of the animators spoke in a tearful interview of a letter they received following the release of the film. It was from a recently widowed father with two sons. He claimed that he hadn’t known what to tell his boys when they asked where their mother had gone following her death. When they went to see the film and the two boys saw Mufasa speaking to Simba from the clouds, he was able to explain to them that this was where there mother was. That she would never leave them, just as Mufasa had never left his son.
This is more likely the true reason The Lion King is so well-loved and well-remembered twenty years later. For all that could have gone wrong in a second-string production, everyone working on it banded together because they wanted it to succeed. They had something to say. Instead of sticking by their B-team status, the creative crew elevated themselves and made their own challenges. It is a underdog story that ends with a brand new tale—one that still has the ability to teach future generations about family, cycles of life and death, balance, and social responsibility.
And it was meant to be a silly romp with talking lions. Which just proves that there’s no good reason to settle for being second fiddle.
Emmet Asher-Perrin remembers seeing that first Lion King trailer in the theater and being utterly breathless by the end. You can bug her on Twitter and read more of her work here and elsewhere.
No love for poor Kimba?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimba_the_White_Lion#The_Lion_King_controversy
@1: Just what I was wondering. Didn’t the producers of Kimba consider suing Disney for plagiarism, but end up backing down and just saying they were “honored by the tribute” because Disney’s lawyers were bigger and scarier than their lawyers?
I am shocked, simply shocked at any suggestion that Disney could be seen as a litigious bully. Or there was anything in any way improper about their research.
http://youtu.be/IL4vWJbwmqM
Somehow the place of Thomas M. Disch in the origination of this film has been lost. I saw the original treatment and backup papers on sale from James Cummins at the NY Book Fair. It is a shame.
@3, LOL.
Thank you for the story, and I loved hearing about the role of Zulu in the creation of the film (in my opinion, that’s one of the most beautiful languages on the planet).
Just one peeve:
they reigned in the references.
REINED in. To rein in is to stop, to decrease; comes from pulling on a horse’s reins. To reign in means to rule over. Sorry, I keep seeing this error, and it’s getting more and more annoying.
What was the place of Thomas M. Disch in the origination of this film? This is history of which I am unaware.
Having been involved in The Brave Little Toaster film, Disch said he was approached by Disney for other ideas. In his treatment, Disch specifically set about writing a version of Hamlet with lions, having been inspired by a nature documentary he’d seen on PBS. Disney may wish to deny that Tom ever made any contribution to the filmas it now exists. That they threw away his work but eventually came back to his original idea demonstrates who better understood the basic principles of the story.
There’s a photo of part of Disch’s treatment at:
http://news.jamescumminsbookseller.com/?p=59
-matthew davis
This is a lovely post. I was the sound engineer on the Broadway production of “Sarafina!”, a musical about the schoolchildren who instigated the Soweto uprising of 1976, written by Mbongeni Ngema and Hugh Masekela. It was about 25% in Zulu, and that language and those voices, some of whom were in the stage production of “The Lion King”, can make me weep with joy.
Kimba gets a shoutout in http://theawesomer.com/the-lion-king-honest-trailer/282573/
It all goes to show how clueless the ‘suits’ were that ran Disney animation at the time. The balance between commerce and art is a tricky one–this movie shows how an inspired team can create a thing of beauty.
One thing I’ve always looked at about this film is that, as a father of (at the time) two young boys who absolutely adored this movie (we went through three copies of the VHS release because they were watched and rewound so many times the tapes broke), this was a huge break from where Disney was with most of their movies at that point in time: it focused on not only a male character, but actually on manhood. Sure, Aladdin had a male protagonist, but the “win the heart of the princess while becoming rich and defeating the evil vizier” plotline was sheer wish-fulfilment, while Lion King presented an actual father-son dynamic (Mufasa has to rank among the top “father” characters in the history of movies), leading into living up to the example of your parents as the movie continued, even leading into wonderful conversations with the boys as to why Simba should or should not have taken certain actions and the repercussions thereof. This, aside from the amazing animation (wildebeest stampede had me at the edge of my seat!) and wonderful music, still makes this stand out as, in my personal opinion, the greatest animated movie ever (and still the only one that brings me to tears just from watching the last two minutes of the film, which I actually paused this article to go do). Opinion, yes, but this movie had a greater impact on the lives of my sons and myself than any other piece of entertainment.
I know this is a very unusual opinion, so please know that I respect everyone’s personal taste and don’t flame me or jump down my throat, but I genuinely would like to know–what is it about this film, from others who saw it as children, that made it such a monumental success? I’m a huge Disney fan, but I have honestly always found The Lion King overrated–the emotional transitions can be forced, in my view, and while much of the background and minor character animation is excellent, there is some really rather poor character animation on the leads at times (you can sometimes tell that there were second-stringers on the project). Plus, while Lebo M’s musical contributions are undeniable, Elton John hadn’t learned to write a musical at this point, and it does seem that he had an unhealthy amount of influence on the story team.
That said, this is THE children’s movie of my own generation, and I’m the only person who feels this way. So–can anyone in addition to Aginor explain why it resonated so deeply for them?
As a fan of Kimba the White lion (or even ‘Jungle Emperor Leo’ in Japanese) in the early eighties, I was pretty shocked at the wholesale plagiarism I saw on my first viewing of the Lion King.
I don’t think I was even out of my teens at the time but I could recognise creative theft when I saw it.
As I’ve grown older, and the internet made possible the immediate visual comparisons, the lack of originality on the side of the Disney creative team behind this is even more astonishing.
Everything external to the basic story, character, and script I have suitably impressed by – the soundtrack and voice acting was superb. But the simple theft of everything else is wrong.
However, The Lion King is not alone in this regard for Disney.
Disney’s Atlantis has largely the same characters, and a similar story to Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water.
I think we’re going to see less of these though – now that we have the internet, it’s a little more difficult to pull these cultural heists off.
@11: The suits at Disney at this time — namely Eisner and Katzenberg — played a major role in salvaging the animation department, which had been a mess since Walt’s death. It’s notable that even though Katzenberg rode roughshod over the animators at times, a large number of them jumped ship to work for him at Dreamworks.
@13, I was already an adult when this movie came out, so I don’t know if I qualify to answer your question. But in my own case the reasson the movie resonated so deeply with me was because how the movie portrayed the loss of Mufasa and Simba’s frief. I know Disney movies had portrayed this before, but for some reason the emotions ran truer and felt more real when I watched The Lion King. Maybe BECAUSE I was an adult?
I had not read or heard of Kimba the White Lion at that point, so I loved this unreservedly. I still love it, though I’ve come to view Disney more cynically now.
Um, I meant Simba’s GRIEF. My spelling is lacking, lately…
mutantalbinocrocodile @13: I, like ducky, was an adult when the film came out, but I’ll take the other side of ducky’s argument: I think your opinion is correct.
I was a huge fan of Disney’s three previous movies — I went back to the theatre to see Beauty and the Beast eight times, and loved The Little Mermaid and Aladdin almost as much — and I was almost giddy with anticipation for the next one, and went to see it on opening night. And I just plain hated it. “Circle of Life” is pretty, but after that it doesn’t so much “go downhill” as “spiral in and crater”. When it isn’t predictable it’s offensive, and the songs range from merely lame to flat-out awful.
I forgive it for existing because the Disneyland parade they made out of it was cool, and because without “Hakuna Matata”, there would never have been a “Hasa Diga Eebowai”. Otherwise: meh.
Well for whatever it was. It is farrrrr better than Frozen. I do not really know why people are so gaga over Frozen, much more overrated than Lion King by 9 folds. Never compare the two.
@13: You’re not alone. I was never blown away by this movie. I was 13 when it came out and I thought it was fine, but not great. Even watching it again recently as I try to work my way through the Disney canon I still feel this way. There are several films from the animated canon that I think are way better.
But then, I also think that about Beauty and the Beast, which I’m apparently suposed to think is Disney’s best. (Again, it was fine, but not my favorite.) It all comes down to taste. Yeah, we’re definitely in the minority on this one, but that should only bother people who can’t even explain why they like it so much.
I was watching “A New Hope” the other night. That 20th Century Fox intro always sends a shiver up my spine. It occured to me if I see the sequels, that will be replaced by The Mouse’s Castle at Disneyland.
As others (1,2,8,14, etc) point out, this film was in no way original or unique, much less “based on no fairy tale whatsoever” or “independent of direct source material”.
It’s disappointing that the author of this review couldn’t be bothered to do even the most cursory research into the history of the Lion King (the Kimba controversy gets mentioned in the Lion King’s Wikipedia article, for crying out loud). If Tor.com is going to publish press releases from Disney PR, could you at least provide a disclaimer noting that this was sponsored content?
As someone suggested on my LJ, Googling ‘[topic of next Tor post] + controversy’ could well avoid future repeats of things like this or the now vanished MZB post.
Disch, now there would be an interesting subject for a short piece. Fair warning: it would not all him being ripped off by film companies while having the work he was proudest of ignored. He spent a lot of his final days embracing energetic xenophobia.
@19 Agreed about Frozen’s over-ratedness. It was a good movie. But the insanity to which people are going about the movie, the thousands upon thousands of remixes of “Let it Go” is just getting old fast.
I liked the Lion King too. I think some of it is overrated but at this point I attribute a lot of that to the nostalgia surrounding it too. But I can see how it could have a big impact on people like @12. I know I saw it when I was pretty young and Mufasa dying was just about the saddest thing I had ever seen.
I know I saw it when I was pretty young and Mufasa dying was just about the saddest thing I had ever seen.
When I was in grade one, my school showed a double bill of Old Yeller and The Red Balloon. My working theory is the authorities felt the grade school suicide rate was too low.
On the plus side years later it led me to write something based on the question “What if Sam Spade had to give Travis Coates advice about what to do about Old Yeller?”
Plagirism is not the word to describe the Kimba/Lion King. The visual and artistic influences are many, but, so what? This is the point of the commons. You can’t own the culture. You can’t own the idea of talking Lion’s and spirits in the sky.
Disney absorbed the culture that was dominant, built on it, and produced something new, which while having it’s deritivite elements, also has many new and unique elements to it, which in turn has fueled a whole new generation of creativitity and art.
From the Wikipedia plot summary of Kimba:
In Africa during the mid-20th century, as mankind encroaches, the white lion Panja gives the jungle’s wild animals asafe haven. However, he angers nearby villagers by stealing their cattle and their food to feed the jungle carnivores. (In the English dub Panja merely frees the cattle.)
A professional hunter, Viper Snakely (known as Ham And Scrambled Egg in the original Japanese), is called in to stop these raids. He avoids directly attacking Panja. Instead, he records the sounds of Panja and uses them to trap his mate, Eliza, who then becomes bait in a trap for Panja. Panja is killed for his hide, and the pregnant Eliza is put on a ship, destined for a zoo.
Kimba (Leo in the Japanese-language version) is born on the boat. Eliza teaches him his father’s ideals. As a huge tropical storm nears, she urges her cub out through the bars of her cage. The storm wrecks the boat, and he flounders in the ocean. The fish help him learn to swim. As he begins to despair, the stars in the sky form the face of his mother, who encourages him. Guided by butterflies, he makes it to land.
Leo/Kimba lands far from his ancestral home and is found and cared for by some people. He learns the advantages of human culture, and decides that when he returns to his wild home he will bring culture to the jungle and stand for peace like his father.
The show follows Leo/Kimba’s life after he returns to the wild, still a young cub, and how he learns and grows in the next year. Leo/Kimba soon learns that only communication and mutual understanding between animals and humans will bring true peace.
The plot doesn’t sound anything like The Lion King. From the Wikipedia article, it doesn’t sound like the two works have anything in common besides the main character’s name (and given that “Simba” is literally Swahili for “lion”, I highly doubt that’s a rip-off) and one screenshot.
If Disney was in some way inspired by Kimba, the final product seems to bear as much resemblance to the original work as Frozen does to Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen. Which is to say: almost none.
Oops, the italics didn’t work for the above. Re-post:
From the Wikipedia plot summary of Kimba:
In Africa during the mid-20th century, as mankind encroaches, the white lion Panja gives the jungle’s wild animals a safe haven. However, he angers nearby villagers by stealing their cattle and their food to feed the jungle carnivores. (In the English dub Panja merely frees the cattle.)
A professional hunter, Viper Snakely (known as Ham And Scrambled Egg in the original Japanese), is called in to stop these raids. He avoids directly attacking Panja. Instead, he records the sounds of Panja and uses them to trap his mate, Eliza, who then becomes bait in a trap for Panja. Panja is killed for his hide, and the pregnant Eliza is put on a ship, destined for a zoo.
Kimba (Leo in the Japanese-language version) is born on the boat. Eliza teaches him his father’s ideals. As a huge tropical storm nears, she urges her cub out through the bars of her cage. The storm wrecks the boat, and he flounders in the ocean. The fish help him learn to swim. As he begins to despair, the stars in the sky form the face of his mother, who encourages him. Guided by butterflies, he makes it to land.
Leo/Kimba lands far from his ancestral home and is found and cared for by some people. He learns the advantages of human culture, and decides that when he returns to his wild home he will bring culture to the jungle and stand for peace like his father. The show follows Leo/Kimba’s life after he returns to the wild, still a young cub, and how he learns and grows in the next year. Leo/Kimba soon learns that only communication and mutual understanding between animals and humans will bring true peace.
The plot doesn’t sound anything like The Lion King. From the Wikipedia article, it doesn’t sound like the two works have anything in common besides the main character’s name (and given that “Simba” is literally Swahili for “lion”, I highly doubt that’s a rip-off) and one screenshot. If Disney was in some way inspired by Kimba, the final product seems to bear as much resemblance to the original work as Frozen does to Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen. Which is to say: almost none.
I saw The Lion King as a kid, and it’s my second-favourite Disney musical (after Beauty and the Beast, which I didn’t see until I was an adult – I don’t think I watched any of the Disney princess films as a kid). A lot of that is the soundtrack, for both films – they’re both pretty much flawless, to my mind, and nothing since them really matches up. Simba’s also got quite a lot more development, and more of an emotional journey, than most of Disney’s protagonists up to that point
@15 Thanks for the additional info. My remarks @11 were off the cuff, and I obviously don’t know enough about the inner workings of the Disney corporation at the time. It has been a pleasure to see the animation arm of the company doing so well in recent years–it is hard to remember that there was a time when they were struggling.
@@@@@ 22, 23 – I was previously aware of the Kimba controversy, and after doing due research came to the same conclusion as KatherineW and dpmaine; there are clear visual influences, but the story is completely different. Moreover, this was intended as a celebratory anniversary piece, not a comprehensive history of the film.
@31
Yes, the plots are different. But there are clear influences, and even for a “celebratory anniversary piece” it is misleading to write of the Lion King as completely original or independently created. Imagery and ideas pulled from Kimba, story taken from Hamlet and apparently from Tom Disch: like all of Disney’s other works, this is a story which was built upon the creative work of others.
Now might be a good time to jump in with a reminder of our moderation policy–please keep the conversation civil and respectful. Everyone should feel free to disagree with the post and/or other commenters, but there’s no call for bile, rudeness, or personal animosity in this discussion. Thanks.
Other than a king’s being killed by his brother, what does the story of The Lion King have in common with Hamlet? Hamlet is a grown man who was away when his father was murdered; Simba is a child whose uncle convinces him he is responsible for his father’s death. The ghost in Hamlet urges him to revenge; as best I remember, the ghost of Mufasa urges Simba to grow up and take responsibility. Hamlet does not flee the country and hang out with the comic relief while he grows up. He does not return home in triumph and rout the forces of murder and disorder. He does not get a happy ending. I just don’t get these claims that The Lion King has much at all in common with Hamlet.
Great article! I love this movie – honestly one of my top 5! We just booked west end theatre tickets to see the show in August and we can’t wait!