Part 1: A Completely Unnecessary Polemic

Walt Disney put me ahead of the game as a child. I discovered misanthropy at the age of seven, when my parents subjected me to the idiotic Mary Poppins. I saw all of those people running around on the screen; and between them, they couldn't come up with a single interesting thing to say or do. I didn't understand how movies were made, so I blamed the actors. And I didn't really understand the specialization of labor, so I blamed my species for the failure of the actors.

Thanks to the Disney releases of the 70s, I quickly graduated from misanthropy to genocidal fantasies. When my Sunday School teacher covered that Biblical line about a man with faith the size of a mustard seed being able to move a mountain, I just knew that my faith was big enough for God to answer my prayers of annihilating humanity and preventing us from embarrassing ourselves any more than we already had with the likes of Son of Flubber.

It all went back to some idiot psychologist who had written an article for Good Housekeeping or some such magazine that my mother read while I was gestating. She became convinced that her chief parental duty--more important than providing her offspring a balanced diet--was to prevent her children from watching anything objectionable on television or at the movies.

As I look back on my life, I see that things worked out for the best. That idiot psychologist hadn't written anything about censoring the reading of a child. And the fact that the only things I was allowed to watch were guaranteed to be wholesome (i.e. dull) led me to a premature discovery of the value of books. My parents were always so happy to see my reading that they not only to allowed me to check out any books I liked, but routinely purchased whichever books I wanted but couldn't find in the library. I remember walking into a B.J. Dalton Bookseller as a preteen and having my mother fill out a request for The Anarchist Cookbook. When it arrived and I followed its instructions to build my very first pipe bomb, she didn't mind at all. She was glad to see that I was interested in 'science.'

Unfortunately, one of the nosy women at church saw me reading that naughty text in the parking lot and told my mom that the book had recipes for the manufacture of illicit drugs, including the absurd substance bananadine. (Remember what Frank Zappa had to say about bananadine? "You would scrape it/You would bake it/You would smoke it/You even thought you was getting ripped from it." Now that's the kind of humor that exposure to The Anarchist Cookbook prepares a person for.) So my cookbook was eventually taken away from me, but otherwise, I was able to read absolutely anything I wanted. When you're fourteen and under the impression that nothing worth watching (except Star Wars and Gandhi) has ever been made for television or film, you're extremely lucky. I managed to escape that whole high school experience of endless MTV-viewing.

And I have Disney to thank for it.

So let me say it loud and clear: Thank you Disney Studios for churning out such crappy films that I gave up on film before I even started school! And thank you Disney Studios for that awful television show you aired at 6 p.m. on Sundays that my parents made me watch and that nurtured a very special loathing for television in my young breast.

I swore off Disney after seeing Gandhi while spending a weekend with a friend. Gandhi made me realize that films could be great and that resistance was not futile. The next time my parents tried to make me watch a Disney film, the thirteen-year-old Sloucho, who had absolutely no sense of proportion, replied, "You can kill me, but you cannot make me watch another one of those movies. And when you kill me, you will have my dead body, not my compliance."

They shrugged and took my little brother to the movie. It turned out that they hadn't been forcing me to watch Disney at all. They had been allowing me. If we were going to watch movies, we were usually going to watch Disney films. And if we were going to watch television, it was going to have to be that Sunday night Disney show. But I think they would have preferred doing without television and film entirely. They too preferred reading.

Oy, they weren't such brutes after all. My mom had stuck to Disney only because she didn't have the time to sift through the incredible amount of garbage churned out by Hollywood and the television studios to see what would be proper viewing material for her children.

But even if my righteous indignation wasn't as solidly grounded as I imagined it to be at the time, I did swear off Disney films once and for all. I told myself that nothing could make me watch another film from that wretched studio--at least not one of the kiddie flicks--no matter what happened. This semester, however, one of my students decided that she wanted to do a comparison between Hamlet and The Lion King for her final analytical essay. The outline that she submitted seemed rather compelling, but I knew that I would have to watch The Lion King in order to evaluate her paper competently. I tried to come up with a legitimate argument as to why she would have to choose another topic. But no matter how I structured the argument, the main reason for my objection was pretty obviously my reluctance to watch The Lion King.

So I gave in and rented the wretched thing.

Part 2: The Review That Interests Me Far Less Than the Unnecessary Polemic

Disney is just as bad as I remember from my 70s childhood. We're still subjecting our youngsters to characters that don't behave with anything approaching consistency and songs so bowel-looseningly terrible that the theaters in which this film was shown must have replaced their seats with toilets.

Randy Newman terrorized my youth with his execrable lyrics, lyrics that he will continue to produce until a wooden stake is driven through that infernal heart of his. In The Lion King, however, Tim Rice has set out to demonstrate that he can write songs that are every bit as awful as Newman's.

Here's a perfectly representative snippet:
[Simba] I'm gonna be a mighty king, so enemies beware.
[Zazu] I've never seen a king of beasts with quite so little hair.

Get it? Simba's mane isn't developed yet, plus 'beware' rhymes with 'hair.' It's a shame that the next lines aren't, "Put your arms in the air/Like you just don't care," because that is also a spectacularly brilliant use of language--and it would continue the rhyme.

As for the dialogue, there's one extremely interesting interchange between Mufasa (the lion king) and Simba (the lion prince) concerning the nature of the stars:

Mufasa: The great kings of the past look down on us from the stars.
Simba: Really?
Mufasa: Yes.

'Yes' is all Mufasa bothers to say. He doesn't illustrate his affirmation with some metaphorical story that Simba will grow to understand in time. Even the fascistically paternal Bill Cosby would have come up with a story to tell at that point, something with a redeeming lesson that would justify his imposing such nonsense on a child. Apparently Disney films aren't for parents who use the story of Santa Claus to illustrate points about generosity and self-sacrifice; they are for parents who simply like to gull their children in the same way that they were once gulled. Hey, I think that's great! Stupid families deserve movies that they can enjoy together too!

Mrs. Sloucho (a generous soul, hence her patience for moi) is a great admirer of Disney films; she goes on and on about the artwork. She went so far as to say that The Lion King is a masterpiece of animation. As I watched the film, I couldn't help wondering what would make her say such a thing. Occasionally the animated characters' mouths open and close with a positively jarring disregard for the words that they are supposed to be saying. And the animators' sense of scale is, shall we say, 'flexible' at best. Simba seems to grow and shrink noticeably in the course of a single day, as he is the size of his father's head at one moment, the size of his paw the next, and roughly half his size whenever he needs to be.

The worst moment in the film has to be the antelope stampede unleashed by Scar (the usurper). A veritable river of antelope washes through the valley of Pride Rock. I'm not just talking about a few dozen or a few hundred antelope. I'm talking about thousands upon thousands. All of the antelope that ever were or ever will be have congregated for the purpose of endangering Simba. And they're stampeding because, umm, well, it's not exactly easy to say why they're running. At first we suspect that the hyenas have started the stampede at Scar's request. But later, when we visit the body of Mufasa, we see a dawdling antelope trying to catch up with the rest of the stampede. If there are hyenas chasing the rest of the herd, then that lone antelope is actually chasing the hyenas, which strikes me as less than advisable. So perhaps the antelopes were just stampeding because Scar asked them to. If that's the case, however, then he might have wanted to ask them to stampede back after he became king so that the carnivores of his kingdom wouldn't starve.

The antelopes play a very important role in the circle of life, as explained by Mufasa. The lions eat the antelopes and then die and fertilize the ground which yields grass for other antelopes to eat. Astonishingly, Simba doesn't ask what happens to the antelopes that don't get eaten by lions. Because Disney films appear to be targeted at children who are naturally uncurious, Simba doesn't ask any of the questions that any of the children I know would have asked under similar circumstances.

As much as I feel morally compelled to give this atrocious film a single star, I have to confess that the actors who lend their voices to the project turn in sterling performances. I had no idea who did the voice work for the film and was impressed throughout as I recognized one truly great voice after another. "That's James Earl Jones. . . . That's Jeremy Irons. . . . That's Whoopi Goldberg not being irritating. . . . Is that Nathan Lane?" Mrs. Sloucho invariably nodded her assent and said, "They do a great job of casting voices, don't they?"

They really do. I will concede that Disney does one thing well. And I'll add that the song that most impressed me was the one not-quite-sung by Jeremy Irons. His blend of speaking and singing reminded me of Rex Harrison's charming performance in My Fair Lady.

Before you watch this film with your children, buy them a book so that they can have something to read once they realize how dull the movie is. Nothing promotes literacy quite like cinematic garbage.







Recommended: No