If I ask you what comes to mind when I say “The Lion King,” you may think, as I do, that it is one of the greatest movies to ever roar onto the big screen. You may think of ’Circle of Life’ or ’Hakuna Matata,’ or maybe a tear falls when Mufasa’s death replays in your head. What you may not think of, however, is a movie that no one was supposed to care about.
In celebration of The Lion King’s 30th anniversary, we spoke to some of the members of the original team that defied the odds – and doubts from Disney itself – and collectively built one of the most beloved stories that remains as powerful and resonant today as it did when it debuted on June 24, 1994.
The Movie No One Was Supposed to Care About
Our story begins back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when The Lion King was in a much different and far less musical form and was known as King of the Jungle. It was also a very interesting time for Disney, as the company was evolving after the unprecedented success of developing and releasing such classics as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. Most Disney animators had previously been able to work on every project at the studio, but now there was too much going on that teams were now being split more than ever before.
“A lot of people were looking ahead to working on Pocahontas, but I knew that Pocahontas wasn't on my horizon and that King of the Jungle was,” supervising animator for Young Simba and soon-to-be Disney Legend Mark Henn told me. “I thought this looked very interesting, and I think a lot of us did. We thought it really could be the equivalent of Bambi for the previous generation. This could be our Bambi.”
As Henn mentioned, Pocahontas was the sure-fire hit that Disney was putting everything behind at the point, including the most experienced animators, and The Lion King was a bit of an unknown quantity. According to Alex Kupershmidt, the supervising animator for the Hyenas, “the way we talked about it, it was an A and B production type of situation. Pocahontas was the big, prestigious kind of piece, and The Lion King was on a B-rail, so to speak."
So, why was this the case? Well, as I hinted at before, the movie was in a much different place. In the early days of the film’s development, Oliver & Company director George Scribner was leading the charge and was pushing a more naturalistic, National Geographic-style approach. The story centered around a war between lions and a Scar-led group of baboons, Rafiki was a cheetah, and Timon and Pumbaa were Simba’s childhood friends.
The movie was much more serious and wasn’t instilling the most confidence at the studio. It was around this time that famed lyricist Tim Rice, who was also working on Aladdin with Alan Menken, was working with Disney to find a songwriter to team with him on The Lion King. Menken was busy, so Rice suggested ABBA. When that didn’t work out, he pitched Elton John even though he had little hope they’d be able to get him aboard. As we all know now, they did.
Scribner was not happy. They were trying to make a movie about Africa and he didn’t understand how Elton John could fit into that equation. That didn’t go over too well with Disney and Scribner was shortly thereafter taken off the project. In his stead, Roger Allers, who was already working alongside Scribner, became co-director with Rob Minkoff.
The pair were working together for a couple of months and then former head of Walt Disney Studios Jeffrey Katzenberg called a breakfast meeting with the crew of The Lion King and Pocahontas. As recalled by Minkoff in The Lion King: A Memoir, Katzenberg’s words pretty clearly confirmed Pocahontas was still the favorite.
“Pocahontas is a home run,” Katzenberg said. “It’s West Side Story, it’s Romeo and Juliet with Indians, it’s a hit! The Lion King, on the other hand, is kind of an experiment and we don’t really know if anyone is really going to want to see it.”
“Jeffrey took us all to the garden terrace and told us if the movie did more than $50 million, he’d get down on his hands and knees. No one had any faith in that movie,“ executive producer Tom Schumacher added in The Lion King: A Memoir. Luckily for Disney, that wasn’t entirely true, as the team on The Lion King took that challenge as a badge of honor.
The Decisions That Led to a Prince Becoming King
So what was it that turned The Lion King from an “experiment” that nobody was supposed to care about to one of the defining films of our age? For one, it became a story infused with some of the greatest works of art from our history while forging its own unique identity. Many know that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a huge inspiration for The Lion King, but there are so many more stories the team drew from
From Joseph growing up as royalty and then being banished before returning years later to Moses receiving wisdom from the burning bush, many parallels can be drawn between past literary works and The Lion King. However, at the core of these stories lies timeless themes we can all relate to in our lives, including betrayal, redemption, responsibility, fitting in, family, community, growing up, loss, love, and more.
Alongside that, the work of Elton John, Hans Zimmer, Lebo M, and all the other musicians who worked on The Lion King became another turning point for a lot of the crew in believing they were on to something special.
Elton John and Tim Rice created the song “Circle of Life,” but Hans Zimmer was the one who had the idea to infuse African vocals into it. He had a friend named Lebo M who he had worked with on the film The Power of One and knew he’d be perfect for the role, but Lebo M was now working as a valet driver and wasn’t easily reachable.
“I had this idea for this chant, but I could I not find Lebo,” Zimmer said in The Pride of The Lion King. “I mean he had gone completely AWOL. The directors were going to come at 3 or whatever in the afternoon and at 2:30 there was a knock on my door and it was Lebo. He comes in and I put some headphones on him and go, ‘Ok, start singing!’ So, what you hear from the opening is literally take one, the only take, I think, of this.”
With that, the defining song of The Lion King was created in roughly 15 to 30 minutes, according to Zimmer, and it would go on to spark the inspiration for the opening of the film. That opening, which is undoubtedly one of the most memorable intros in the world of entertainment, was perhaps the biggest turning point for the project as it led to a decision that began to change the minds of those inside and outside of Disney that this B-tier film may have the makings of greatness.
When we imagine trailers from the 90s, what comes to mind is a deep voice narrating over a ton of clips from random parts of the movie that revealed way too much. For The Lion King, however, Disney chose to buck that trend and just release the opening song. To say it was one of the most important decisions of the company's history is even an understatement.
"To me, the most defining moment of the project was when they released that trailer, as it was basically unprecedented," Henn said. "They just released that opening sequence, and even talking about it gives me goosebumps up and down my back. When we all watched that trailer on the big screen and the 'Boom!' happened, we all knew this was going to be very, very special."
“I remember the first time I heard ‘Circle of Life’ and it was just Elton and the piano, and you're like, ‘That's a nice song! That's okay.’ However, it didn't wow me or do anything crazy to my brain,” Rachel Bibb, in-betweener for the Hyenas told me. “But when we heard the Hans Zimmer and Lebo M orchestration of it, there was something so special about that. And when that first trailer came out where it was just that song and it ends with that boom, I remember we all got chills. ‘This is big. Now, we have to make a movie that lives up to that feeling.’”
The opening moments of The Lion King and that trailer may have set the tone for everything going forward, but there was also another moment that was equally as important to the film’s success, and that was Mufasa’s death.
“It was really brave,” Bibb said. “I still, to this day, am so amazed that we allowed Mufasa's death scene to play out as it did with Simba there, that moment where he's with a dead body on screen and it's so visceral. I remember the first time we even saw it on the storyboard, we were like, 'there's no way this will make it.' Then it would get animated and we said, ‘Oh, this will never come to clean up. It'll get cut.’ Then it went to clean up, then it went to color. We kept waiting for every single screening for that scene to get cut. Disney's very sensitive to the audience that is watching its movies, and we just kept expecting that to get cut, but we knew it was so important to it and so pivotal, that it was our Bambi moment, and it stayed. I will always applaud the bravery of that decision.”
Henn then revealed a heartbreaking detail about Mufasa's death, which he was able to animate and the one he says he is most proud of. As the proudest dad in the world and someone who lost his father five years ago, this one hit me right in the heart.
“I knew going into Mufasa’s death scene how important it was to not have it be insincere, sugary, or manipulative,” Henn said. “I wanted it to be very genuine. And the thing I kept thinking about was the fact that Simba had never dealt with death before and he didn't know what was going on. That's why he initially went through the thought process of, ‘Oh! Dad's just asleep, so I'm going to push on him, tackle him, pull on his ear, and do the things that I normally do.’ And this was all set up early in the film when he's doing the same thing waking him up for their outing, which was a much happier moment.”
The team’s goal was to not skirt the issue of death, as it is part of that great circle of life, but embrace it and show how we can move on and grow and find our place without leaving the memory of our loved ones behind. There was also the very Shakespearean choice to, as producer Don Hahn said in Pride of The Lion King behind-the-scenes documentary, “put the death of a parent side-by-side with a flatulent warthog.” It was the classic combination of offsetting tragedy with comedy, with the filmmakers making sure we would never fall too deeply into despair while watching.
And what was more hopeful than Mufasa’s story not ending with his death? His presence is felt throughout the rest of the film and he remains by Simba’s side as the young lion works to find his rightful place and become the king he’s meant to be.
Changing Animation, and Disney, Forever
Simba’s perseverance echoes the work of The Lion King team who, despite those who doubted the project, kept believing and guiding this movie forward to what would become one of the biggest box office openings and successful films of all time.
Per Box Office Mojo, The Lion King earned $968.7 million at the global box office on a budget of $45 million and remains the highest-grossing traditionally animated film of all time. Furthermore, it changed Disney and the perception of it for the wider audience. Sure, Disney had been a household name for many years and produced countless classics, but this was different.
“What I could feel was a sense that we weren’t just making kids movies, but these were the kinds of films that everybody in Hollywood made, frankly for most of the 20th century,” animator Marlon West told me. “They were intended for general audiences for everybody to go see. And I really felt that post-Lion King, that we wanted a date movie that people went to see over and over again, and the expectation was that we were making films that were running right alongside Star Wars and James Bond or whatever the biggest blockbusters of the time were.”
“The success of The Lion King was so overwhelming that it went well beyond just, ‘Oh, we made so much money.’ It was as if after The Lion King, the animation industry just exploded,” Kupershmidt said. “When we were doing it, we were pretty much the only kid in town. However, it also had a huge impact on the wider creative community, from Broadway to the music industry to the voice-acting industry, as it stopped being a niche thing for the rest of Hollywood.”
Speaking of Broadway, The Lion King’s stage show also took the theatrical world by storm and has grossed over $8 billion since it debuted in 1997. Besides that, there have been multiple spin-offs, a live-action/animated remake, and we’re gearing up to learn more of the story of The Lion King in the prequel film Mufasa on December 20, 2024.
Aaron Pierre, who is playing the younger Mufasa in the upcoming prequel and credits James Earl Jones as one of his greatest inspirations, says that even 30 years later, the legacy of The Lion King is as strong as ever.
“My goal and my objective from the very beginning of this process has been to honor and champion and celebrate the original story and the power and the greatness of those original portrayals,” Pierre told me. “The best way I can do that is to really deeply dive into what I imagine this young lion's adolescence would've been like, what this young lion's childhood would've been like, what his journey to that pinnacle of his life would've been like. Because I feel like to become that great, you have to overcome certain obstacles, you have to overcome hardships, and you have to have a lot of really challenging conversations with yourself regarding your belief system and your identity.”
Pierre’s words epitomize the journey of The Lion King. It was a project that existed in the shadow of Disney greats which was overlooked and undervalued, but one that found itself thanks to the hard and dedicated work of a ragtag group of talented individuals that wanted to tell a great story that mattered.
Much like Simba, that story was just waiting for the perfect moment to become king.
Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on TikTok.
