The Lion King’s remake allowed Disney to cash in again on one of its greatest hits – revitalising the ruling class mythos it perpetuates in the process. But making the brand more real (if you can look past the characters’ nightmarish mouths, and ability to sing) has also underscored just how ridiculous those assertions were in the first place – and a retconning pre-sequel looks set to deepen those problems.
Whichever way you look at it, 1994’s The Lion King is a weirdly effective host-body for ruling class ideology. It essentially injects the principles of Reaganomics into a discourse about the natural world via the iconography of The Circle of Life™ – the concept which reigning ‘King’ Mufasa uses to justify his divine right to rule. The food-chain isn’t just a great pyramid in which all the wealth is just lazily hoovered up by the feline equivalent of Henry VIII, in between his latest bouts of sleep, sex or murder. No.
It might look like plants and herbivores do huge amounts of work to convert energy from the sun into the building blocks of life, before female lions slaughter and feed said prey-animals to a male that sleeps for 20 hours per day. But actually, sometimes that ‘King’ will take a dump, or maybe even die, and that will actually nourish the grass upon which the rest of the Savannah depends for sustenance. The wealth will trickle down.
It is laughably obvious why this kind of narrative device for ultra-capitalists would appeal to studio executives, who themselves sit atop a great pile of gold, while fuming at the idea that their ‘antelope’ (actors and writers) would dare to question whether they were getting a raw deal in Hollywood’s own great circle of economics. So much so, that in the glorious years before its full integration with Disney, Pixar literally adopted The Circle of Life™ as a mantra for one of its villains (the exploitative robber-baron Hopper in A Bug’s Life). It’s a nicer, more floral way of snapping “because that’s the way it is!” at a toddler asking why America doesn’t have universal healthcare, or why the government is gifting Silicon Valley huge tax cuts that could have been used to pay for said healthcare – and like all lies, it also has a grain of truth hidden in there.
Of course, a real ecosystem does depend in some ways on apex predators to maintain a balance that provides a relatively stable life for the wider food-chain. The famous cases illustrating this are the results of reintroducing wolves to a Yellowstone Park once in a state of biological collapse; or the huge decline in fish-stocks which occurred in areas where people decimated the populations of whales. In turn, the reality is that predators like lions (and hyenas) are important for maintaining a healthy natural world. But the era of politicised abundance – in which there is enough for everyone in the world to eat, just not the political will or economic mechanism to fairly distribute it to them – trying to use the natural world to excuse a distinctively unnatural state of play is a stretch, and does not stand up to any kind of lengthy thought.
When you start transposing human belief systems onto an ecosystem as a means of naturalising your worldview, you find yourself in an increasingly absurd situation of having to cherry-pick which parts of the natural world are natural, and which parts are silly or evil. Without reckoning with this, the original film of The Lion King has long fallen prey to the children who imbibed it unquestioningly growing up.
It’s just a kid’s cartoon
Most obviously, memes have become obsessed with Simba’s character arc. Young male lions being run out of their pride as they begin to reach sexual maturity is an essential part of life for the species. Lions have evolved this behaviour because the prides where it didn’t occur became riddled with sickly inbreds, and did not survive when the crises that favour diversity (disease, drought, new rivals emerging) occurred. In human terms, new King Scar’s excommunication of Simba from the pride can only be read as cruel because we are a species that can stay close to our families while (usually) understanding we shouldn’t try to fuck them. But in the natural world, Simba’s return to take his ‘rightful place’ as the sole breeding male in a pride where he is related to all the lionesses (because the only breeding male before him was his father) is a disaster. Arguably, making the pride into an incestuous hereditary regime would fit with Disney’s attempt to anthropomorphise lions into a hereditary monarchy – but not in the way they would want to play up to.
Beyond that, though, in far less ‘quirky web-comic’ territory, there are problems with The Circle of Life™ itself. Lions aren’t the only animals to make stool or die of natural causes in Africa. Everything else ultimately returns to the soil – but scavengers also play an important role in that. Hyenas are reviled in The Lion King, banished from Mufasa’s weird ethnostate, bound to live in an elephant graveyard where the sun never shines. But hyenas have evolved to crunch bones and live off scraps other animals can’t stomach – helping the precious nutrients The Circle of Life™ hinges upon to be recycled back into the system quicker. In a world of human logic, the role of the hyena can’t be any more or less noble than the lion for that reason – and in some way the filmmakers must have realised this, because they realise that they have to draw on more anthropomorphisms to make hyenas more villainous. Sure, as real hyenas do, Shenzi, Banzai and Ed try to kill lion cubs. But in reality, so do leopards, and other lions – and in the world of this film, those animals aren’t banished to the Third World in the way hyenas are.
There has been a lot made of the othering of the hyenas in The Lion King along the lines of dominant human ideology. It has been noted that the characters are voiced by African American and Latin actors – while many of the ‘respectable’ roles in the film are white actors. I think that this could be accurately accused of cherry-picking, because as Mufasa, James Earl Jones is the paternal super-ego that drives the entire narrative. But at the time when the film was made, both Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin were known for playing counter-cultural or working-class archetypes – the people who don’t just neatly go along with The Circle of Life™ as they are supposed to. The people who might expect a little more from life than just being ground into Soylent Green for their social superiors, and thus threaten to upset the whole operation.
This is channelled into the film’s unnervingly catchy song Be Prepared, in which he sells a plan to the hyenas to overthrow Mufasa, who has banished them to starve on the peripheries of society. During this song, the hyena clan puts on an impromptu recreation of the Nuremburg rally, their flat heads, grey coats and black paws blurring into a mass of goose-stepping furry fascists. When the plan works, and the natural order of Mufasa is upset, however, a drought immediately occurs and sees all the prey animals flee. Not only have the hyenas been coded as the very worst artefacts of 20th century human history, then, they also end up making things worse for everyone (and themselves) in the process.
It is a ‘lesson’ which has been consistent throughout the ages at Disney. Expect more from life, and you’ll wind up being sent to a communist salt-mine, or starving to death surrounded by Nazi hyenas. So, don’t ask questions, and make the best of the way things are!
Of course, all of these absurdities can be waved away to an extent, because The Lion King in its original form was a cartoon about talking animals. It is not something you should take any more literally than the one about a flying carpet and a song about ‘barbaric’ punishments; the one where crows put on a minstrel show; or the one where a fox and a dog inadvertently make a case for segregation. The entertaining quips, the funny songs, the themes and the messaging to help shape young minds are more important than the practicalities required to make the stories a reality.
Death of ideas
The problem Disney now faces is that it has had to pivot its entire brand, after a century of chasing anyone with new ideas out of the company. Existing in the same age of dead ideas that gave us Twisters, it is run by business people with no idea how to create for themselves, and having spectacularly binned the majority of the company’s hand-drawn animators amid the hype of CGI, it is now evidently short on ways to bring in new cash-flow. Beyond acquisitions of Star Wars and Marvel Universe properties – which seem to be giving dwindling returns – that has forced Disney to turn to selling old rope for new money; converting the company’s library of classic cartoons into drab computer-generated remakes.
These films are on the one hand very depressing, because they are a clear sign to any kids with a love for art that the world where they could live as a creator – while it was always a small chance – is now officially dead. Don’t bother learning to draw cute cartoon characters. Whatever star you happen to wish upon, Disney doesn’t want to know. On the other hand, they are extremely funny, because they do not work on any level the moment they are shoehorned into ‘reality’. In the remake of The Lion King, these aren’t just cute drawings of lions prancing about to entertain the kids, no, these are representing real lions. So, Simba ends the film fathering a cub with his half-sister, and we are asked to believe that whenever drought strikes the Serengeti, it is not because it is the dry season, but because an evil lion has taken control of a pride during a vague re-arrangement of Hamlet.
Now, with the announcement of Mufasa: The Lion King (part-prequel, part-sequel, all-mess), it seems clear that Disney’s executives have cottoned on to the need to retcon at least some of this. The film, which will be released this Christmas, centres on an origin story which suggests Mufasa is actually not originally from the pride featured in The Lion King – meaning it will be at least a couple more generations before Simba’s heirs to the dynasty really start resembling the Habsburgs. In this re-telling (nightmarishly billed as a kind of imagined DVD commentary, where Rafiki the mandrill narrates over previously unseen footage, with ‘colour commentary’ from Timon and Pumba) will see an orphaned Mufasa become an adopted member of a new pride, and form a brotherly bond with their prince, Taka (who goes on to become Scar). The tale then becomes one about a triumph against the odds – and of a cub without “a drop of royal blood” ascending to the proverbial throne.
You have a sense that one of the many, many people who worked to try and make this story less prone to sniping from jerks like me, sighed “THERE. Now we can move on” when the pitch was finally accepted. Except… except that by leaning into the realism angle, in trying to come up with reasons why this can still be realistic and not utterly grotesque as a story, this will entirely undermine the original motif of the film. Mufasa has no more right to rule than anyone else on the savannah. That spiel he gave Simba about all the kings who came before him being in the sky, looking down on them – that’s a list of rulers who he has no connection to, and would likely be actively resentful to him as he would have overthrown their order to put his “common blood” at the top of the pecking order.
Presumably, that upsetting of the way of things won’t result in a famine. If so, there is no divine right for this small ruling class to expect everyone else on the menu to bow before them; The Circle of Life™ is not contingent on any one of them getting to eat all the other apparently willing participants in this story, or dictate where they live. And there is also absolutely nothing wrong with wanting more than your allotted social station affords. Ironically, then, in a story which is so nakedly about naturalising the dominant ideas of human society, the more real and natural the story tries to be, the more inauthentic and absurd the ideology at its heart becomes.