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Four years of work, forty million dollars in budget, 968,483,777 dollars in gross revenue (record held until 2013, beaten by "Frozen"), 4 Oscar nominations and 2 statuettes won (best original score; best song, "Can you feel the love tonight"). Can such impressive numbers justify the status of the most beloved Disney film of all time?
I don’t think so. Because "The Lion King," which was released quietly in the U.S. in mid-June 1994, and then grandly worldwide at the end of November that same year, is certainly an important film, in some ways historical, but it's also full of flaws or heaviness, in my opinion, unjustifiable. And of those years, the '90s, the so-called Disney Renaissance, other films before and after this one seem more successful and original to me ("Beauty and the Beast", "Aladdin", "The Hunchback of Notre-Dame", "Hercules"), except for that rather massive blunder, namely "Pocahontas".
"The Lion King" came out a year before "Toy Story", and that’s not a minor detail. Because while the Pixar film was the first entirely made by computer, to put it simply, in history, "The Lion King" partly anticipated it, so much so that John Lasseter said he was, ironically, beaten to the punch. Because the Disney film massively used computers for the first time compared to classic animation (computers already used in previous films, see "Aladdin", but more sparingly) and the Disney animators' study of the movements of animals, lions in particular, was so meticulous that the result is indeed extraordinary; the lions move so naturally and realistically that at the time, audiences were, rightly, left awestruck.
Some sequences are then marvelous. The first five minutes, famous, with "Circle of Life" in the background and all the animals going to pay homage to the newborn Simba, are exceptional, but technically even more extraordinary is the stampede that overwhelms, and kills, King Mufasa. A shock for those who were small at that time (I, myself, was 10 years old), equivalent to the shot that ends Bambi's mother's life.
Praise also goes to the songs, perhaps a bit predictable but effective, by Elton John and Tim Rice (which includes some classics, among which "Hakuna Matata" and the aforementioned "Circle of Life") and also Hans Zimmer’s excellent original score.
However, there’s a but.
Apart from the alleged controversies over plagiarism of an old Japanese manga by Osamu Tezuka, "Kimba - The White Lion" (here all the information: Kimba - The White Lion - Wikipedia), what you see, or at least should see, is that "The Lion King" seems like a blend of previous Disney films and non-Disney films in general, all shaken together in an hour and twenty-five minutes. There is "Bambi" (the relationship between Simba and the mother), there's "Hakuna Matata" as an expression to say to solve every situation like already with "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" from "Mary Poppins", and then onward to cite Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, the Nazi iconographies in the musical number "Be Prepared," "Star Wars" and, above all, poor Shakespeare because this, whether you like it or not, is Hamlet done with anthropomorphic animals. Honestly, a bit too many rip-offs. None of these even hidden, in addition to the self-references from "Aladdin" and "Beauty and the Beast".
Narratively it is unbalanced, in the sense that it is divided into two far too evident sections, a pre and a post Mufasa. And the main characters, aside from Simba and Mufasa, are a bit bland (Simba's mother is in the shadows from start to finish, as is the whole world of lionesses, on the fringes of the empire, in this respect today it would be called a semi-machist film) and it completely misses the use of secondary characters. In every respectable Disney film, the comic sidekicks are the water of life, here the gags are entrusted to Timon and Pumbaa alone (a meerkat and a warthog), amusing, but too marginally held, so much so that they only appear in the second half when the film is already well underway. And even attempting to update some popular African beliefs (represented by the shaman monkey Rafiki), besides not being adequately explored, seems to want to wink, unsuccessfully, at an adult audience.
Obviously, nostalgia is just around the corner. If I judge it with the eyes of my ten-year-old self, I find it a masterpiece (but I would have found "Captain Tsubasa" a masterpiece too then), if I judge it with the eyes of me, today, forty-year-old, I see it as a sometimes majestic film, historically important, a milestone in animation as a whole, but full, packed with quotations and references to others that, culpably, weigh the whole down.
Hakuna Matata to all.
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