Gooding-Williams vs Morton papers

When reading the Gooding-Williams article, I was not entirely convinced by his argument, and felt that his writing style was a bit tangential at some times. However, when reading the Morton article, I realized that while I did not agree necessarily with all of his argument (some of it was more convincing) at least he had one. Morton did not really argue anything other than that Gooding-Williams was wrong. He did not bring anything new to the ‘conversation’. Gooding-Williams brought in a lot of outside evidence, which did make his argument more credible. Some examples of this are when he talked about Hegel’s portrait of Africa, Hitler reviewing his troops at Nuremberg, and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. He also brings in a lot of specific evidence from the film it self, mentioning the significance of the voice actors, the “Circle of Life” song, and several quotes from the film. While I did not agree with his argument against the rhetoric in the “Circle of Life”, since I found it to be far fetched and not super well supported, I thought that other components of his article were convincing, such as the portrayal of the hyenas and the portrayal of Africa itself. Meanwhile, I did not find Morton’s argument as convincing. I did agree with some of his claims, and understand his points, but could not find a solid thesis or argument that extended beyond ‘Gooding-Williams is wrong’. His paper was comprised entirely of the ‘they say’ and had none of his own thoughts for the ‘I say’ portion. All he did was negate Gooding-Williams’s argument. He did bring in some outside evidence, referencing The Hegelian and Plato, however this evidence was more thrown in, without explaining how it contributed to his argument. However, he did bring in a lot of evidence from the film itself, referencing Simba’s relationship with Pumba and Timon, Scar’s plans to kill Mufasa and Simba, and the end of the film. He too was tangential in this sense, arguing something small about the significance of a scene in the film, that perhaps could have turned into a legitimate argument, but then just dropping it, and not tying it back to any legitimate thesis or claim. While I did not necessarily agree entirely with either author, I felt that Gooding-Williams had a better supported argument, especially since, at least to me, he was the only one out of the two to have a concrete claim.