"Hamlet" it ain't - good Disney, it ain't either, I'm afraid to say

Rating: 3/10 (13 September 2009)

For starters, I've been a big Disney and animation fan all my life; seeing Pinocchio at a pretty early age and "Robin Hood" on its initial release made huge impacts on me, and by the time this film came out I'd caught up with all of the Disney features. I loved - and still love - the early work, and have mixed reactions to most of the stuff from "Peter Pan" through "Oliver and Company" with a few exceptions. "The Little Mermaid" seemed like a return to form - and a return to the fairy tales that the company always seemed to do best with, and I liked "Beauty and the Beast" even more. "Aladdin" was alas a major step down - still pretty solid in the animation department, but Robin Williams' shtick was for me completely out of place and irritating. It was of course their biggest hit to that point, and they took some of the lessons they'd learned - less romance, more slapstick and gross humor, celebrity voices - and applied them to "The Lion King" with even more spectacular results.
For 15 years this film has ranked among my worst films of all time, and every time I mention that I get people reacting as if I told them I was the Antichrist. Seriously - I think more people will get bent out of shape if you tell them you hate "The Lion King" than if your feelings are negative about "Citizen Kane", "Casablanca", or "2001". It's always struck me as weird, because I know I'm not the only person to dislike it, and in fact none of the friends I saw it with when it came out liked it much - though none of them hated it like I did either.
I think that the main problem for me in 1994 is that the elements that I disliked from "Aladdin" in particular seemed amped-up several degrees here. I hated Whoopi and Cheech, hated the music, hated above all what I saw at the time was an infantilist assault on intelligence and wit - the smartest and coolest character in the film, Scar, also is pure evil, and all of the "good" characters are white-bread, boring, stupid. Dumb and strong triumphs over smart and clever; the songs sucked; the animation was coarser and less interesting than in the previous couple of films. I suspect that there were a lot of personal issues that contributed to my overwhelming hatred of the film, too, but those are lost to me at the moment.
I'm pleased to say on this re-watch that I don't HATE the film anymore. But I still don't like it. The issues with the treatment of Scar - not sure what I was thinking there, that was over-the-top on my part. Sure Jeremy Irons' voicing of him is in many ways a typical smart but venal character, a Godless intellectual I suppose - but it's not really that overstated or deliberate, it doesn't come off as anti-intellectual to me anymore. James Earl Jones' Mufasa may not be a genius, but he doesn't come off as a dumb noble-hearted brute either, and nobody can really beat Jones in that kind of role. The opening sequences are somewhat impressive, and the film is rarely boring. I actually sort of liked the shaman baboon character Rafiki (Robert Guillaume), and it's good that young Simba (Jonathan Taylor Thomas/Matthew Broderick) takes a fair amount of screen time to grow up.
But...I still hate the music; "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" I actually found tolerable in relation to the other songs, but even it was so cloying and just banal that I had a hard time not fast-forwarding. This is purely a matter of taste, I make no bones about it - I like very little of Elton John's post-1970s work and so it's not surprising really. I still find the hyena characters irritating, unfunny, and way over-used. The female characters are essentially just there to move the action forward - no, the film ain't obviously racist like I guess I thought it was (though it's rather confusing in its racial and ethnic undertones) but it's definitely a boys' film. Timon and Pumbaa are gross and annoying and the film as a whole just has no sparkle, no wit to me. The animation doesn't have the zip or the beauty of the previous few films; the direction and pacing seem more inevitable than exciting, the "spectacular" scenes like the stampede that kills Mufasa just don't come off as all that spectacular as the digital help is too obvious and cheap-looking.
In any case, it wasn't torture to watch anymore, and it's actually reawakened an interest in going back through the Disney feature canon, re-watching some of the ones I don't remember well and catching up with a few of the newer ones that I never bothered with after being disappointed by this and "Pocahontas" in succession.