Of all the Disney movies growing up, this one has always been my favorite

Rating: 10/10 (13 April 2010)

Yes, definitely my favorite hand drawn animated movie of all time. It was my favorite as a child and it still is now. This is an epic and cult tale based loosely on Shakespeare's Hamlet. Set in between Kenya or Tanzania, Africa at an unknown time, the king and queen of pride rock christen their son, Simba, as the new prince. His uncle, Scar (Jeremy Irons), however, longs for the throne, so he conjures up several plans with the hyenas to get rid of the king Mufasa (James Earl Jones) and Simba. The first one doesn't work, but in the second he is half successful. Luring Simba in a stampede of wilder-beasts (The goose bump-giving score by Hans Zimmer as powerful as ever at this point) Scar gets Mufasa to save him but then, as the king climbs to the top of a rock, Scar claws him and releases him. Simba then finds his father's dead body on the ground, and while mourning him, his uncle arrives, and convinces him it was his own fault, sending him away, with the hyenas on his tail to finish him off.
Simba escapes everything and runs far away. He almost dies in the desert but is then rescued by meerkat Timon (Nathan Lane) and Warthog Pumbaa (Ernie Sabella) who teach him to adapt to a sort of hippie life of good times and bug eating. Now grown, Simba (Matthew Broderick) has a run in with Nala (Moira Kelly) his childhood friend, while she hunts Pumbaa. They fall in love and she tries to convince him to go back, but he refuses. Later, while in the grasslands, he meets up with the baboon that christened him, Rafiki, and he leads him out to speak with the ghost of his father, who reminds him of who he really is and what he must do. He speeds off back to his kingdom, now degrading under the false king, to reclaim his throne and set peace to Pride Rock.
I couldn't give my opinion about this film without explaining the plot, if you'll forgive me. It really is a Disney classic that's unique in so many ways. The scene in which Simba tries to wake his dead father is horribly tragic, but extremely powerful. Disney already did something similar with Bambi, with the implication that the protagonist's mother had been killed. But it had never reached to the extent that the audience saw the death or the dead body of one of the parents. The Lion King is a 100 times more powerful than Bambi. Even though I never cried at that scene, I was always very uncomfortable with it. The script is also really cool and witty and should have been nominated for the 1994 Academy Awards, along with the winner Pulp Fiction.