Disney’s Thirty-Second Animated Feature - 1994 (original release) 2011 (3D release)
I have a confession to make: I’ve never been a huge fan of The Lion King. While it’s impossible not to get swept up in its beautiful animation, top-notch voice performances, and exciting story, the essential phoniness of animal life along with its celebration of adherence to royal bloodlines and “proper” succession to the throne has always irked me. A much earlier Disney classic about animals in nature, Bambi, was set in a world where animals speak and the owl is a friend to a rabbit; but on the whole, the story of Bambi set the deer in a recognizable, realistic world. The Lion King, on the other hand, is more a movie about a European royal family (pre-Renaissance) than it is about any group of animals.
