Disney's "The Lion King"

Holy nostalgia… I knew I had good memories of the movie, but when “Circle of Life” started playing it brought a flood of emotions that I definitely wasn’t expecting. I fully believe the movie lived up to my memory and expectations too, unlike many others where when you watch them again, they don’t have the same “feel” or specialness that you once associated with them.

            Before watching the movie, I did look up and read a few articles that found flaws with the movie. While there were a number of things about the “realism” in the movie, and it not being accurate (like Mufasa and Scar, two male lions, living in the same pride), there were some pieces that talked about more serious issues.

            One of the articles attacked the movie as racist, saying that the depiction of the hyenas was the main example. It thought they were shown as being “ghetto” and non-white, and that since the characters were the bad guys, it was associating non-white as bad, and white as good. I have some issues with their argument. There can be an argument made that the movie is classist and equates being poor with bad, but I don’t think race comes into play nearly as much as they say it does. I really didn’t think they sounded any more ethnic than any of the other characters. I was paying attention throughout the movie to how every character talk, and it just comes across that every voice actor is using a pretty natural voice. Young Nala is played by a black actor, and so are Mufasa and Sarabi, and I guessed that before looking up who voiced them. All this to basically say, I don’t think race plays a role in what should be criticized with The Lion King.

            However, I do think an argument can be made about some other aspects of the hyenas. To start, they do represent a lower class and poorer group of people, and the movie represent them in a negative light. They’re starving, and when they get help and join the bigger society, they end up ruining it. This could be taken to mean that poor people are bad for society, and so they shouldn’t be helped and worked with like Scar is doing (granted, Scar was obviously doing it in the worst way possible). Also the fact that they’re more “savage” than the upper class Scar, who is cunning and conniving and takes advantage of the lower class hyenas. However this could be taken as a positive message, in that the smart evil upper class citizen was taking advantage of the less intelligent lower class ones and this was a bad thing. This does however bring up the idea again that the hyenas shouldn’t have been portrayed as dumb in the first place (although I’d argue Shenzi wasn’t presented as unintelligent). There is also Ed, the hyena who obviously has some sort of mental handicap, and who’s also the butt of a good number of the films jokes.

I’ll admit, I thought most of them were funny, but I can see why some would take issue with the movie making fun of someone with a mental handicap.

            I also found an interesting argument about the movie that I think makes a very good point. Simba’s whole character development surrounds him getting over the guilt from being responsible for his father’s death; yet this is only resolved when Scar admits he’s the one that killed Mufasa. The movie doesn’t show that Simba shouldn’t have felt bad even if his father died in the way Simba originally thought. The movie should’ve shown Simba getting past the fact that he was inadvertently responsible for his father’s death, and had other characters console him when he feels bad about it. Instead all of the lions turn on him when Scar reveals that Simba was responsible for killing his father. Granted, it makes for a more interesting climax when it’s Simba versus all, but in terms of the overall message I think they could’ve improved it slightly.

             I can easily see why it’s hard to find problems with the movie. Overall I think it’s an amazing family film, that I already know I’ll end up watching with my kids one day. Viewing it again after many years was truly a justifiably pleasant experience.

I forgot to mention the scene with Scar and the hoard of hyenas doing the Nazi salute. I’m not sure what I think of that, given that they wanted to show the characters as evil so it might be okay, but I definitely agree there’s a correlation there.