** THE LION KING
With the voices of Matthew Broderick, James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons, Rowan Atkinson, Moira Kelly, Jim Cummings, Whoopi Goldberg, and Cheech Marin.
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The issue isn’t exactly reality versus fantasy, because all Disney pictures are fantasies. In real life a white orphan isn’t likely to be adopted by a black man even if the white orphan’s best friend is a black orphan who comes along with the bargain (as in Angels in the Outfield). Real animals don’t speak English, much less with various ethnic and regional accents. The issue is what realities and what mythologies inflect the various fantasies.
Such mixtures mitigate and complicate the tribalism of the plot: the lion king–first Mufasa, then Scar, and finally Simba–lords it over the rest of the animals within a given territory known as the Pride Lands. Mufasa restricts the scavenging hyenas to the Elephant Graveyard (apparently for ecological reasons), but they invade the savanna with Scar’s blessing after Mufasa dies. Complicating matters further is the fact that the movie virtually equates a nostalgia for nature with nostalgia for old-fashioned royalty–epitomized by the enlightened (and ecologically correct) rule of both Mufasa and Simba. Meanwhile the Elephant Graveyard is viewed as a sort of urban blight, a dangerous, anarchistic slum overrun by a gang of ghetto hyenas.
