Disney's The Lion King

I am going to start off by saying that I absolutely love Disney’s the Lion King and always have! Everything about this movie is so amazing from the beautiful music and incredible animation to its comedic aspect. I also happen to have a little brother who  loves the movie as well and therefore I watched this movie with him in order to right this blog. My brother got into liking The lion King movie after starting to watch the new show that is a Lion King continuation called the Lion Guard. In all honesty, I did not need to rewatch this movie because I practically have it memorized from the amount of times I’ve watched it. I still cry every time I watch Mufasa’s death scene and find Mufasa’s and Simba’s relationship to be so adorable.

Before rewatching this movie, I tried to look into critic reviews on what issues people may have with Disney’s The Lion King. Every time I’ve watched it, I didn’t find much issue in it but I guess that’s because I just thought of it as a cute, innocent, and funny children’s movie, instead thinking of any deeper meaning or stereotypes the movie may portray. One of the articles I came across discussed racism in Disney’s The Lion King. It discussed how Disney was attempting to represent different cultures by creating a movie set in each continent. However, it doesn’t look too good on Disney’s part that the first movie they set in Africa, the characters are animals, which the article said goes along with the idea that Africans are not as “advanced” as white people. The articles I read also discussed the different accents that each character had and which characters were actually voiced by colored people. After reading this. I decided to look up the voice actors myself and was shocked to see that most of the voice actors were white. The worst part is that 2 of the four main colored voice actors I saw were the evil hyenas. At least two fo the biggest and respected characters were voiced by colored people. Going along with the idea of the hyenas, the article also discussed how the hyenas may represent people of color and depicted them as “evil, stupid, and lazy,” thereby depicting them with the characteristics of a stereotypical colored person. Because of this, the article even went as far to say that Scar is kind of heroic and Mufasa could sort of be seen as a villain as well. Mufasa has forced out a whole group of animals to live in a dark place to starve, isolated from everyone else because they are “inherently evil” and thereby exclude them from the circle of life. After reading about the different accents of the characters, I decided to pay close to that as I watched the movie and found myself very surprised again. It was true. The main, most powerful characters who are above everyone else have American accents such as Mufasa, Simba, and Nala. The two character portrayed as smart have British accents. Zazu, whose smarts is used as Mufasa’s advisor, is British. Even Scar, the evil villain, has a British accent because he is portrayed as way smarter than all the hyena savages. Lastly, the hyenas are given stereotypical “ghetto” accents. One accent that I noticed for the first time was that one of the hyenas had a stereotypical latino male accent, since he is played by a Mexican-American. This was just an interesting observation that I never noticed and can now see why the movie could be thought of as racist, especially in terms of the hyenas. I’m not sure if it was Disney’s intention to portray certain stereotypes and have certain voice actors play certain characters but either way, it is something to think about. 

Stepping away from racism and stereotypes, something else I noticed is that the Fight scene at the end and the fall of the villain resembles the fight scene of Beauty and the Beast. In Beauty and the Beast, the Beast and Gaston fight and when Beast has the upper hand and is going to kill Gaston, Gaston pleads for his life and Beast being the hero gives in and just tells him to leave. Then Gaston being the villain tricks him and stabs him in the back but then falls to his death. This is basically what happens in the Lion King. Simba is about to defeat Scar and push him off the cliff but then instead gives into Scar’s plead and tells him to run away. Then when Scar attempts to get back at him, he falls of the cliff to the angry hyenas. However, I also know that the same screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, worked on Beauty and the Beast and the The Lion King.

Despite noticing these things as a rewatched it, I cannot help but love this movie. Although there are still racist stereotypes, I do think Disney tried to represent African culture in the way they know how. I like how people like Lebo M were hired to make the film more representative of African culture. From this, they created one of the most famous and spectacular opening numbers that uses the language of the largest ethnic group in South Africa.

Overall, this is one of my favorite Disney movies and couldn’t help but sing along to all the songs with my little brother as I watched it.