D52 Week 32: The Lion King!

The Lion King is, by a significant margin, the most successful of Disney's Renaissance era films, which is honestly kind of surprising, because it's also probably the strangest. The Little Mermaid? Not particularly weirder than the original tale, though certainly less depressing! Beauty and the Beast? They actually came up with reasonable reasons to have household objects sing songs and, furthermore, to make people drink fluid poured forth from Angela Lansbury's nose! Aladdin? Who cares if Aladdin is arbitrarily Arabian instead of Chinese, because you're not expected to pay attention to anyone who isn't Robin Williams anyhow! But The Lion King is pretty inexplicable, when you get down to it. It's kinda sorta Disney's adaptation of Hamlet, except with animals. And not anthropomorphic animals living in an otherwise human-style society, like Robin Hood, even! They're normal animals, living normal animal lives, and they even eat each other like normal animals, except they talk and worship certain lions as kings-slash-demigods. The worst side-effect of realistic animals is that, of course, our main character's Disney love interest is, at best, a cousin of some sort; at worst, his half-sister. Because, y'know....it's a fun film for the entire family! *wink wink*

And which popular pop artist's music is the obvious choice to accompany this backdrop of murder and political feline turmoil and incest? Why, do you even have to ask? Elton John, of course!

Remember what I said about Aladdin last week, and how it suffered due to seeming unsure of what sort of tone it hoped to achieve? The Lion King suffers from this even worse! Maybe it's not so bad at first. So what if Zazu kind of detracts from the attempts to portray Mufasa's kingdom as majestic, in any way? I can overlook that much. (Like Sebastian before him, you have to wonder how he's still employed....though Sebastian at least had entertainment value going for him.) But then, serious stuff starts happening. Mufasa gets killed by a surprisingly convincing herd of CGI wildebeest! Simba gets framed and has to go on the run! Scar sends the area surrounding Pride Rock into a really severe drought within the span of, like, one year, just because he's such a shady guy, and there's death and destruction everywhere! It's all very serious business, so OF COURSE it's constantly offset by jokes about how Pumbaa is flatulent, and generally malodorous. Isn't that hilarious and original?? When I was a kid, I remember thinking Timon and Pumbaa were kind of hilarious, because....well, I guess because I was supposed to, being a kid and all. But they're.....kinda not. That's their entire shtick. Pumbaa smells terrible, and Timon constantly talks about how terrible Pumbaa smells. That's it!!! Isn't that a depressing little relationship they have going on there? They're not living a carefree life; they're living a content-free life! I've known slackers, and even by the standards of slackerdom, Timon and Pumbaa just don't fucking do much, at all!

It's a shame, too, that they stink up this movie with their stinkiness, because the more serious parts of this can be pretty compelling at times. Jeremy Irons (who seems to have, at one time or another, been in just about every well-known Shakespeare play EXCEPT Hamlet) as Scar is yet another case of the excellent villain casting streak that started with The Great Mouse Detective. You're either a liar or an evil sociopath yourself (hi, Jim's family!) if you claim that the scene where he kills Mufasa ISN'T one of the most chilling things in any Disney film ever! And he has hyenachoirs who pop up for the sole purpose of singing his praises in a green glowy cave! You have to be REALLY IMPRESSIVE to have spontaneous hyenachoirs, now don't you?? By the way, as we all know, green glowiness is cartoon shorthand for radioactivity, because Scar is clearly in the process of enriching uranium. Because he's EVIL. At least, that's the logical assumption - can you think of a more reasonable explanation for the dark, barren condition of Pride Rock after he takes charge? It's some sort of nuclear winter, folks! Nothing else makes sense! Though, that still doesn't explain why it suddenly rains after he dies. Um. Someone else can explain that one? In all seriousness, though, he's another well-drawn villain. It's just too bad that the circumstances surrounding him are so....unfortunate.

By which I mean, he's clearly evil, because he's the only black-furred lion. Right? Blackness automatically means you're evil, which is a wonderfully sensitive message, especially for a film that's actually set in Africa. Nice job, Disney!

Sure, it's less overt than some past gems of Disney racism, like the Asian cats in Lady and the Tramp and The Aristocats and, god, at least two others, right? But it's something they've been really eager to hammer home during the Renaissance so far, isn't it? Purple Ursula was considerably darker-skinned than the other merfolk, who were....well, whatever the deep-sea equivalent of being Caucasian would be. And Percy McLeach WAS darker-skinned than the other, like, two or so humans in The Rescuers Down Under, I don't care what the people who claim that's just because he spends all his time standing in shadows say, because that's just silly. I'd sooner accept villainy-related lack of bathing as an excuse, but whatever. Even Jafar was noticeably more ethnic than everyone living in Agrabah, which was otherwise the whitest city in the entire Middle East! (Seriously, I defy you to name someone whiter than Scott Weinger.) And now, Scar too. One film I could see. A couple? Sure. But, by this point, it....kinda seems like the Disney creative teams collectively had some, um, issues with people who look different. Some things never change, I guess! At least we can count on next week's film to be more racially sensitive - oh, wait, NO.

Well, whatever. Scar's still a pretty compelling villain, by himself. He's not helped by the presence of his henchhyenas, though. Were people really clamouring that much for the animated reunion of Cheech and Whoopi-Goldberg-as-Chong-for-some-reason? And then we have Ed, who.....is not Jim Cummings' brightest moment. They are, basically, to Scar as Timon and Pumbaa are to Simba, bringing down what is otherwise a pretty grand story. And it's hard to tell whether or not they should be viewed as some sort of racial allegory, as well. Yes, hyenas don't get along with lions all that well, because they're selfish and awful and they like to drive lionesses away from their kills sometimes. From a natural perspective, it's perfectly understandable why lions wouldn't be cool with living with them. Because they're selfish and awful. But, god, just the way it's PHRASED. Scar talks about it like they're trying to integrate some poor maligned minority, and suddenly everyone's disapproval of it sounds completely AWFUL, and it's really uncomfortable how they get scapegoated for all that awful rural blight that's going on. But, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that, no, there aren't any racist undertones there. Even still, isn't it kind of hypocritical? Mufasa, in one of his more dickish moments, expects the gazelles or whatever to be totally chill about being murdered, because the lions decompose into gazelle food, aka grass, after dying of natural causes, so by extension it's totally okay to make the gazelles into lion food, aka bloody gazelle flesh, after making them die of very much unnatural causes, because Circle of Life! God, what a douche, right? NOT trying to justify it would make him look better! But, alas, he did, and now he has to live with having said that. So, um....the gazelles are supposed to be okay with being taken advantage of like that, but the lions have no such compulsion to do so with the hyenas??

Visually, this is definitely some of Disney's finest animation ever. Mostly realistic, with just enough cartooniness to make all the cute fuzzy (or feathery) critters expressive enough to tell a story. It's a similar case to Bambi, from waaaaay back when - you can tell that the animators spent a lot of time researching actual animals, but they also know when to give the animation a hallucinogenic quality to underline whatever's going on at that moment (though, they do that considerably more here). I can't fault this film visually. I can, however, fault it musically. I'm not going to deny that Elton John is very talented at that whole songwriting thing, but the act of writing standalone pop songs is a very different thing indeed from writing songs that work within the context of a musical. It certainly doesn't help that Tim Rice is, as a lyricist, not up to the standards of Howard Ashman or Alan Menken. Together, they produce one of the least memorable Disney soundtracks in recent memory, to be perfectly frank. "Circle of Life" is a perfectly decent theme song, and "I Just Can't Wait To Be King" is good fun (though a good deal of the credit there goes towards the unusually stylistic animation), but "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?" Not with a song that strangely limp I can't! It feels like it's constantly on the verge of taking a leap to another level, like you're just hearing the lead-up to a grand explosion of emotion....but then, you don't, and it's not. That's all there is. As for "The Morning Report"....well, it sure makes the (re-)addition of "Human Again" in Beauty and the Beast look perfectly natural and reasonable and worthwhile by comparison, now doesn't it?

So, without being able to fall back on particularly strong musical numbers, The Lion King pretty much lives or dies on its story. And, again, the half of it that isn't about porcine body odour is quite nice! But.....again, half of it IS about porcine body odour, so this movie was probably a lot better when you were a kid than it was now. Especially now that you're probably soul-crushingly aware of Simba and Nala's dirty little webbed-footed secret.

TERRIBLE AND UNNECESSARY AND GENERALLY SCORN-INDUCING DISNEY DIRECT-TO-DVD SEQUEL OF THE WEEK: The Lion King 2½ takes place during The Lion King 2, picking up after the climactic finale of The Lion King. I don't know where it takes place relative to The Lion King 1½, because I haven't seen it yet, thank god. Anyway, Scar apparently had a cub. Let's call him Scab, I guess. He can be played by Adam Hicks. Scab witnesses Scar's death, and looking for emotional support, he consults Cousin Simba, who tells him how he went through the whole thing. But - here's the wacky misunderstanding - Simba directly quotes Scar's "you killed him" while telling his story, and Scab things Simba was telling him to that NOW, in the present! So, Scab goes on the run, where he befriends a carefree Giant African Land Snail (Jim Belushi) and his malodorous Archispirostreptus gigas friend (Jamie Kennedy), who teach him how to live life in a carefree way, by eating wild pork. Everything seems lucky for Scab, now an awkward young adult, until his gross maternal love interest (Phylicia Rashād) shows up to snap him back into reality, forcing himto return to Pride Rock and confront his awkward misunderstanding so he can properly reclaim his throne, as a terrible evil lion's terrible evil son. And so continues the Circle of Life, which recycles entire plots, too!