The Lion King was Disney’s attempt to make a movie about two things: Africans and the works of Shakespeare. They most likely made the principle characters lions and other creatures of the African savannah out of a combination of fears that they could not portray black people in a sufficiently tasteful and respectful manner and fear that their audiences would react badly to a children’s movie about black people (Twomey 1994). The Lion King is a reinterpretation of Hamlet and as with any reinterpretation there will be aspects of the source material that are distorted, downplayed or outright ignored. This is especially true in the case of a movie like The Lion King that was inspired by multiple sources, possibly including the less well-known Kimba the White Lion (Bradley 2015). But then, if interpretations and takes on classic stories did not vary widely then we wouldn’t need literature and film papers.
As the opening paragraph suggests one of the biggest critical issues with The Lion King is racial. Aside from Mufasa, the king of Pride Rock and father of Simba whose murder touches off the overall plot of the movie, most of the characters in the movie are voiced by actors of Euro-American descent. Except of course for the hyenas. You can draw a parallel to the more recent controversy of The Last Airbender, a live-action adaptation of an epic Nickelodeon cartoon notable for its skillful and excellent portrayal of fantasy versions of Inuit and various East Asian cultures whose director make the fascinatingly bad decision to cast white actors in every major role except for those of the villains. Similarly, The Lion King has animal characters voiced by white people, but the only characters with accents or dialect that are stereotypically associated with black people or other American ethnic minorities are the villains. Or more specifically, they are the villain’s slinking henchmen and foot soldiers. They constitute what to all appearances is “an untouchable caste. No non-hyena character ever says anything pleasant to or about them. They live in a bare, dilapidated slum where the sun doesn’t shine” (Schanning 2013). These are the characters voiced by actors like Whoopi Goldberg who speak with stereotypically ‘ghetto’ accents. They lend credence to the idea that Disney went with an all-animal cast for this particular movie because they did not want to make a movie about human black characters, either out of fear of doing it wrong or out of personal preference or both.
The Lion King has some very dark moments. Simba sees his father trampled to death by wildebeest before his eyes and spends years growing up with the belief that he was personally responsible for it. When he finally returns home he discovers that his father was apparently a proverbial Fisher King and that the Pride lands have fallen into a Mordor-esque state of gloom and ecological collapse in response to his uncle’s seizure of power. That said, it is a Disney movie for kids and by this time Disney was no longer in the habit of ending their movies by making children sad. Unlike Hamlet, Simba survives his climactic duel with his uncle. Unlike Hamlet, Simba is portrayed as being motivated by duty and concern for his loved ones’ well-being rather than homicidal vengeance. Even at the end when he has his father’s murderer at his mercy Simba spares Scar and sends him slinking to die at the hands of his erstwhile troops. This is pretty clearly a consequence of adapting the play for a modern underage audience, but it does serve to make Simba both more sympathetic and more heroic through the ways he suffers as a result of his father’s murder and the fact that he acts out of a positive desire to succor and protect others.
In a very real sense The Lion King has had a stronger influence on popular culture and audiences in general than Hamlet, if not necessarily a more enduring one. Shakespeare has influenced generation after generation’s worth of literature, there’s no question of that. But while Shakespeare may have begun as a popular entertainer who wrote brilliant plays for the masses at least as much as any highbrow audience, but in the centuries since he became the Bard he moved out of the street theaters and bawdy houses and into the realm of the academic and the stuffed shirt. Generations of children grew up reading, studying and memorizing his work, but relatively few of them enjoyed it or did it of their own free will. There’s a reason why Lion King voice actor Rowan Atkinson’s character took the time to smack William Shakespeare around for inflicting his work on centuries of British school children when he went back in time in the final and eponymous installment of the also classic Blackadder comedy series (Blackadder: Back & Forth 1999). By contrast, an entire generation of children not only grew up with The Lion King, they grew up loving it with an obsessive passion that drove them to drive their parental units insane by watching it multiple times a day and falling asleep with it playing on the VCR. Shakespeare may have been the greatest wordsmith in the history of the English language, but he did not have mass media and the Walt Disney Corporation behind him. How much people love a work of theater counts for as much as how well-made it was, and the bit earlier about The Lion King not being more enduring than the works of Shakespeare is only an assumption that has yet to be proven or disproven.
Works Cited
Blackadder: Back and Forth. Dir. Paul Weiland. Perf. Rowan Atkinson. BBC, 1999. Film
Bradley, Bill. “Was ‘The Lion King’ Copied From A Japanese Cartoon? Here’s The Real Story.” Huffington Post. Huffpost Entertainment, 27 Jan 2015. Web. 28 Feb 2016
Shanning, Ian. “Racism in the Lion King.” Virtual Insanity. 13 June 2011. Web. 28 Feb 2016.
Twomey, Steve. “‘The Lion King’ a Roaring Success Despite Lambasting.” The Washington Post. 28 July 1994. Web. 28 Feb 2016.
