Simple, effective African panorama

Rating: 10/10 (29 September 1999)

When this first came out I thought it was a disappointing follow-up to `Aladdin'. Shows how much *I* know.
Perhaps I simply found it hard to classify - it's not a fairytale, it's not (whatever they tell you) a cousin to `Hamlet' - in a way it's not a human story of any kind. It's moving only in the way in which a nature documentary is moving (although it's certainly not a nature documentary). Our attachment to Simba is the kind of attachment we'd have to any young animal followed around by the camera - we wouldn't be nearly so attached if he were a human rather than a lion.
But what the film lacks in humanity it makes up in grandeur, so that's okay. The artwork is spectacular. I've never seen an animated film so convincingly sunlit: without giving us photo-realistic lighting, it makes us feel the bright African sun on our skin. Character animation is as good as you'd expect and needs no praise from me. (The lions are actually among the least smoothly moving creatures on display, but that's what you'd expect from members of the ruling class.) And note the clever way the film's realistic style is cross-bred with a child's colouring book style in the `Can't Wait to Be King' sequence - it's just so very well done that we couldn't care less if the sequence is a touch contrived. If the Disney studio has done anything recently to capture the verve of the Pink Elephants sequence in `Dumbo', this is it.
I'm not those who think this is Disney's best animated film (it's in the top ten, for whatever that may be worth), and I STILL find it hard to classify, but it's a perfect example of whatever it is.