Development
The origin of the concept for The Lion King is widely disputed. [13] According to Charlie Fink (then-Walt Disney Feature Animation's vice president for creative affairs), he approached Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy E. Disney, and Peter Schneider with a " Bambi in Africa" idea with lions. Katzenberg balked at the idea at first, but nevertheless encouraged Fink and his writers to develop a mythos to explain how lions serviced other animals by eating them. [14] Another anecdote states that the idea was conceived during a conversation between Katzenberg, Roy E. Disney, and Schneider on a flight to Europe during a promotional tour. [l] During the conversation, the topic of a story set in Africa came up, and Katzenberg immediately jumped at the idea. [16] Katzenberg decided to add elements involving coming of age and death, and ideas from personal life experiences, such as some of his trials in his career in politics, saying about the film, "It is a little bit about myself." [17]
On October 11, 1988, Thomas Disch (the author of The Brave Little Toaster ) had met with Fink and Roy E. Disney to discuss the idea, and within the next month, he had written a nine-paged treatment entitled King of the Kalahari. [18] [19] Throughout 1989, several Disney staff writers, including Jenny Tripp, Tim Disney, Valerie West and Miguel Tejada-Flores, had written treatments for the project. Tripp's treatment, dated on March 2, 1989, introduced the name "Simba" for the main character, who gets separated from his pride and is adopted by Kwashi, a baboon, and Mabu, a mongoose. He is later raised in a community of baboons. Simba battles an evil jackal named Ndogo, and reunites with his pride. [20] Later that same year, Fink recruited his friend J. T. Allen, a writer, to develop new story treatments. Fink and Allen had earlier made several trips to a Los Angeles zoo to observe the animal behavior that was to be featured in the script. Allen completed his script, which was titled The Lion King, on January 19, 1990. However, Fink, Katzenberg, and Roy E. Disney felt Allen's script could benefit from a more experienced screenwriter, and turned to Ronald Bass, who had recently won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Rain Man (1988). At the time, Bass was preoccupied to rewrite the script himself, but agreed to supervise the revisions. The new script, credited to both Allen and Bass, was retitled King of the Beasts and completed on May 23, 1990. [20]
Sometime later, Linda Woolverton, who was also writing Beauty and the Beast (1991), spent a year writing several drafts of the script, which was titled King of the Beasts and then King of the Jungle. The original version of the film was vastly different from the final product. The plot centered on a battle between lions and baboons, with Scar being the leader of the baboons, Rafiki being a cheetah, [17] and Timon and Pumbaa being Simba's childhood friends. Simba would not only leave the kingdom but become a "lazy, slovenly, horrible character" due to manipulations from Scar, so Simba could be overthrown after coming of age. By 1990, producer Thomas Schumacher, who had just completed The Rescuers Down Under (1990), decided to attach himself to the project "because lions are cool". Schumacher likened the King of the Jungle script to "an animated National Geographic special". [24]
George Scribner, who had directed Oliver & Company (1988), was the initial director of the film, [25] being later joined by Roger Allers, who was the lead story man on Beauty and the Beast (1991). [16] Allers worked with Scribner and Woolverton on the project, but temporarily left the project to help rewrite Aladdin (1992). Eight months later, Allers returned to the project, [26] and brought Brenda Chapman and Chris Sanders with him. In October 1991, several of the lead crew members, including Allers, Scribner, Chapman, Sanders, and Lisa Keene visited Hell's Gate National Park in Kenya, in order to study and gain an appreciation of the environment for the film. After six months of story development work, Scribner decided to leave the project upon clashing with Allers and the producers over their decision to turn the film into a musical, since Scribner's intention was of making a documentary-like film more focused on natural aspects. [16] [25] By April 1992, Rob Minkoff had replaced Scribner as the new co-director. [9]
Don Hahn joined the production as the film's producer because Schumacher was promoted to Vice President of Development for Walt Disney Feature Animation. [24] Hahn found the script unfocused and lacking a clear theme, and after establishing the main theme as "leaving childhood and facing up to the realities of the world", asked for a final retool. Allers, Minkoff, Chapman, and Hahn then rewrote the story across two weeks of meetings with directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, who had finished directing Beauty and the Beast (1991). One of the definite ideas that stemmed from the meetings was to have Mufasa return as a ghost. Allers also changed the character Rafiki from a more serious court advisor into a wacky shaman. The title was also changed from King of the Jungle to The Lion King, as the setting was not the jungle but the savannah. [16] It was also decided to make Mufasa and Scar brothers, as the writers felt it was much more interesting if the threat came from someone within the family. [34] Allers and Minkoff pitched the revised story to Katzenberg and Michael Eisner, to which Eisner felt the story "could be more Shakespearean"; he suggested modeling the story on King Lear . Maureen Donley, an associate producer, countered, stating that the story resembled Hamlet . [35] Continuing on the idea, Allers recalled Katzenberg asking them to "put in as much Hamlet as you can". However, they felt it was too forced, and looked to other heroic archetypes such as the stories of Joseph and Moses from the Bible.
Not counting most of the segments from Fantasia (1940), Saludos Amigos (1942), The Three Caballeros (1944), Make Mine Music (1946), and Melody Time (1948); and The Rescuers Down Under (1990) (a sequel to The Rescuers (1977)), The Lion King was the first Disney animated feature to be an original story, rather than be based on pre-existing works and characters. The filmmakers have stated that the story of The Lion King was inspired by the lives of Joseph and Moses from the Bible, and Shakespeare's Hamlet, [34] though the story has also drawn some comparisons to Shakespeare's lesser known plays Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 . [37]
By this point, Woolverton had left the production to work on the Broadway adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. [9] To replace her, Allers and Minkoff met with numerous screenwriters, including Billy Bob Thornton and Joss Whedon, to discuss writing the new screenplay. [35] During the summer of 1992, Irene Mecchi was hired as the new screenwriter, and months later, she was joined by Jonathan Roberts. Mecchi and Roberts took charge of the revision process, fixing unresolved emotional issues in the script and adding comedic situations for Pumbaa, Timon, and the hyenas. [9]
Lyricist Tim Rice worked closely with the screenwriting team, flying to California at least once a month, as his songs for the film needed to work in the narrative continuity. Rice's lyrics—which were reworked up to the production's end—were pinned to the storyboards during development. Rewrites were frequent, with animator Andreas Deja saying that completed scenes would be delivered, only for the response to be that parts needed to be reanimated because of dialogue changes. Due to the rewrites, The Lion King missed its initial release window for Thanksgiving 1993, with The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) assuming its release slot. [41] Hahn stated the film was delayed to a summer 1994 release, "with much consternation, because people said you can't release animation in the summertime." [42]
Casting
The voice actors were chosen for how they fit and could add to the characters; for instance, James Earl Jones was cast because the directors found his voice "powerful" and similar to a lion's roar. [43] Jones remarked that during the years of production, Mufasa "became more and more of a dopey dad instead of [a] grand king". [44]
Nathan Lane auditioned for Zazu, and Ernie Sabella for one of the hyenas. Upon meeting at the recording studio, Lane and Sabella –who were starring together in a Broadway production of Guys and Dolls at the time –were asked to record together as hyenas. The directors laughed at their performance and decided to instead cast them as Timon and Pumbaa. [43] [45] For the hyenas, the original intention was to reunite Cheech & Chong, but while Cheech Marin agreed to voice Banzai, Tommy Chong was unavailable. His role was changed into a female hyena, Shenzi, voiced by Whoopi Goldberg, who insisted on being in the film. The English double act Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer auditioned for roles as a pair of chipmunks; according to Mortimer, the producers were enthusiastic, but he and Reeves were uncomfortable with their corporate attitude and abandoned the film. [46] Rowan Atkinson was initially uninterested in the studio's offer to voice Zazu, later explaining that "voice work is something I generally had never done and never liked [...] I'm a visual artist, if I'm anything, and it seemed to be a pointless thing to do". His friend and fellow Mr. Bean writer/actor Robin Driscoll convinced him to accept the role, and Atkinson retrospectively expressed that The Lion King became "a really, very special film". [47]
Matthew Broderick was cast as adult Simba early during production. Broderick only recorded with another actor once over the three years he worked on the film, and only learned that Moira Kelly voiced Nala at the film's premiere. [48] English actors Tim Curry, Malcolm McDowell, Alan Rickman, Patrick Stewart, and Ian McKellen were considered for the role of Scar, [49] which eventually went to fellow Englishman Jeremy Irons. [50] Irons initially turned down the part, as he felt uncomfortable going to a comedic role after his dramatic portrayal of Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune (1990). His performance in that film inspired the writers to incorporate more of his acting as von Bülow in the script –adding one of that character's lines, "You have no idea" –and prompted animator Andreas Deja to watch Reversal of Fortune and Damage (1992) in order to incorporate Irons' facial traits and tics. [44] [51]
Animation
"The Lion King was considered a little movie because we were going to take some risks. The pitch for the story was a lion cub gets framed for murder by his uncle set to the music of Elton John. People said, 'What? Good luck with that.' But for some reason, the people who ended up on the movie were highly passionate about it and motivated."
The development of The Lion King coincided with that of Pocahontas (1995), which most of the animators of Walt Disney Feature Animation decided to work on instead, believing it would be the more prestigious and successful of the two. [34] The story artists also did not have much faith in the project, with Chapman declaring she was reluctant to accept the job "because the story wasn't very good", and Burny Mattinson telling his colleague Joe Ranft: "I don't know who is going to want to watch that one." [53] Most of the leading animators either were doing their first major work supervising a character, or had much interest in animating an animal. [17] Thirteen of these supervising animators, both in California and in Florida, were responsible for establishing the personalities and setting the tone for the film's main characters. The animation leads for the main characters included Mark Henn on young Simba, Ruben A. Aquino on adult Simba, Andreas Deja on Scar, Aaron Blaise on young Nala, Anthony DeRosa on adult Nala, and Tony Fucile on Mufasa. [9] Nearly twenty minutes of the film, including the "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" sequence, was animated at the Disney-MGM Studios facility. More than 600 artists, animators, and technicians contributed to The Lion King. [25] Weeks before the film's release, the 1994 Northridge earthquake shut down the studio and required the animators to complete via remote work. [54]
The character animators studied real-life animals for reference, as was done for Bambi (1942). Jim Fowler, renowned wildlife expert, visited the studios on several occasions with an assortment of lions and other savannah inhabitants to discuss behavior and help the animators give their drawings authenticity. The animators also studied animal movements at the Miami MetroZoo under guidance from wildlife expert Ron Magill. [56] The Pride Lands are modeled on the Kenyan national park visited by the crew. Varied focal lengths and lenses were employed to differ from the habitual portrayal of Africa in documentaries—which employ telephoto lenses to shoot the wildlife from a distance. The epic feel drew inspiration from concept studies by artist Hans Bacher—who, following Scribner's request for realism, tried to depict effects such as lens flare—and the works of painters Charles Marion Russell, Frederic Remington, and Maxfield Parrish. [58] Art director Andy Gaskill and the filmmakers sought to give the film a sense of grand sweep and epic scale similar to Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Gaskill explained: "We wanted audiences to sense the vastness of the savannah and to feel the dust and the breeze swaying through the grass. In other words, to get a real sense of nature and to feel as if they were there. It's very difficult to capture something as subtle as a sunrise or rain falling on a pond, but those are the kinds of images that we tried to get." The filmmakers also watched the films of John Ford and other filmmakers, which also influenced the design of the film. [9]
Because the characters were not anthropomorphized, all the animators had to learn to draw four-legged animals, and the story and character development was done through the use of longer shots following the characters.
Computers helped the filmmakers present their vision in new ways. For the wildebeest stampede sequence, several distinct wildebeest characters were created in a 3D computer program, multiplied into hundreds, cel shaded to look like drawn animation, and given randomized paths down a mountainside to simulate the real, unpredictable movement of a herd. [59] Five specially trained animators and technicians spent more than two years creating the two-and-a-half-minute stampede. [9] The Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) helped simulate camera movements such as tracking shots, and was employed in coloring, lighting, and particle effects.
