The Lion King: Origins

How we got to a point where this disaster was made.

Once upon a time in the faraway land of California, there was a film studio called Walt Disney Productions.

The company was in a rut. In the two decades or so since the eponymous founder’s death, the company seemed totally bereft of both creative spark and serious business sense. The film division was struggling, and while the live action side wasn’t exactly pulling up any trees, it was the animation division, once the lifeblood of the studio, that was in the most difficulty. The last animated film to benefit from Walt’s personal involvement, The Jungle Book, was also the last time Walt Disney Feature Animation had produced an unquestionable success. The parks were the only thing keeping the company afloat. Though the leadership loved and understood the traditions of the company, they had no idea how to take it forward.

Enter fresh blood. Roy E. Disney, son of co-founder Roy O. Disney and nephew of Walt, used his senior position in the company and on the board to successfully oust the existing team and put in their place, for the first time, a complete outsider as CEO. Michael Eisner had shown an ability to strike box office gold at Paramount, and while he admits that he’d never even seen a Disney film before taking the job, Roy felt he offered exactly the kind of fresh approach needed. Eisner brought with him Jeffrey Katzenberg to run the film studios, while Roy would work with Katzenberg specifically on the animated films.

At first, the new management came close to shutting down the animated division altogether. The Black Cauldron, inherited from the old regime, was an expensive disaster that lost serious money. The next couple of films did ok enough to keep things afloat. Then the good times came. The Little Mermaid, the biggest bet the new team had made yet, paid off in a huge way. On the one hand, it was very classic Disney fare, taking a Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale and putting the kind of feel good spin on it that one could imagine Walt approving of. But at the same time, it was unlike anything the company had made in its golden age. It was a big, stage-like musical, utilising Broadway talent in its songwriting. “The film that brought Broadway into cartoons” is what some called it. Disney had found that the heightened reality of their classic fairy tale tone pairs very well with the theatricality of the stage musical.

The approach found even more success in 1991 with Beauty and the Beast. The more theatrical style of musical seemed to pair just as well with a romantic drama, resonating with audiences widely and even earning an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. In many regards, Aladdin then took the big animated musical in the opposite direction, filling it with fast paced comedy and pop culture references, and that struck gold, too, giving Disney the highest grossing film of the year for the first time since Walt’s death. Following this was the jewel in the crown. The Lion King balanced the more dramatic and comedic tones of Beauty and Aladdin with something that felt sweeping and epic. They smashed it. Lion King was not just the biggest film of 1994 but the highest grossing animated movie ever made at that point.

It wasn’t just the new movies that were cleaning up. After much internal reluctance, Disney started to release the classics on VHS. Not only did the tapes sell extremely well, which in hindsight was all but a given, but they further cemented these films in people’s minds. It could not have been known at the time what power it would hold for Disney to have children growing up watching Aladdin and Lion King over and over again. To extend the properties even further, Beauty and the Beast was turned into a broadway musical, with Lion King to follow, the latter becoming the most successful stage production in history. What was now called The Walt Disney Company was showing itself to be the best in the world at taking successful films and building beloved brands out of them.

With the success, of course, came contempt. Eisner and Katzenberg, the two outsiders who had changed everything, increasingly couldn’t stand each other. Though both were undoubtedly difficult men to work with, Eisner was the CEO, so he won the war. Katzenberg left Disney in 1994 with the company on top, going on to form Dreamworks SKG with Steven Spielberg and set up an animation division to directly compete with the house of mouse. As things were going so well, it hardly felt like Katzenberg’s departure was the end of the world.

The company would have yet more success in 1995, but it would have some rather large strings attached. The biggest animated film of that year was not Pocahontas, Disney Feature Animation’s huge bet that never really paid off, but Toy Story, a Disney distributed film produced by Pixar Animation Studios. Toy Story is one of the most important milestones in the history of cinema for being the first entirely computer animated feature. This instantly made it stand apart from anything anyone else, especially Disney’s in house animation team was doing, but its uniqueness was more than skin deep. While Disney’s animated films, especially this recent run, told larger than life stories with fantastical elements and show stopping musical numbers in a heightened reality, Toy Story went the other way, taking us all the way down to the mundane world of a child’s bedroom. The film was fantastical, yes, but in every way that Disney generally went bigger, Pixar went smaller. The central difference of computer animation is that you’re composing moving images in three dimensions rather than two, bringing things closer to the real world. This can be a curse as well as a blessing, but Pixar used it to great effect here, emphasising the physical limitations of the toy characters interacting with their world. Pixar had flipped every script on what animated films were supposed to be.

They made plenty of money in distributing the films and selling merchandise and such, but still, it was a touch embarrassing for Disney. The template for what animated films could be, the template that they religiously relied upon, had been shattered. In the next few years, Disney Feature Animation had solid successes with The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan and Tarzan, but none of them were anything close to Lion King level hits. These were following the formula that had worked so well in previous years, but with slightly less impressive results. More experimental takes in Dinosaur, The Emperor’s New Groove and Atlantis: The Lost Empire fell flat on their faces. Disney just didn’t have the spark, while Pixar continued to roll out successes with A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. They were effortlessly fresh, they were exciting, and they were computer animated.

But it was Katzenberg’s Dreamworks that really caused problems. A most petty and spiteful man, Katzenberg had deliberately tried to target Disney already, releasing Antz ahead of A Bug’s Life in the knowledge that Pixar were already working on it. But he was getting ready to really stick the knife in. Dreamworks were working on a film that essentially resembled a two hour attack on the Disney brand. A film that would at every attempt prioritise making crass jokes at Katzenberg’s former employer over any kind of real narrative. Improbably, this petty attempt at revenge was a huge hit, beloved by critics and audiences alike and ruining Disney’s life in the process. The film? I think you’ve heard of it.

The years have not been kind to Shrek. It’s contemporary-for-2001 pop culture references and soundtrack feel awfully cynical now, and its early attempt at CGI humans has a touch of uncanny valley about it. But its self aware humour hit a perfect sweet spot for audiences, who loved seeing a fairy tale story poke fun at the genre, with Disney the butt of so many of its jokes. As well as being a smash hit, the film made Disney seem uncool and too safe. How could Disney even be Disney anymore if everyone wanted to see them made fun of, to be promised that a film will be not like that?

And thus began Disney’s 2000s existential crisis. The bread and butter of the animated division, lavish musicals about fantastical premises and fairy tales, had become the epitome of uncool. Disney thus looked at Pixar and tried to copy that approach in house, most notably with its first CGI animated feature, Chicken Little. It was a disaster. The general point at which a film is profitable just from box office receipts is when it makes double its budget (considering the cut taken by cinemas, marketing budget etc). From 1991-99, the eight films that Disney released all smashed this margin, with Lion King going so far as to make 21 times its budget at the box office. From 2000-07, just four of the ten releases managed to double their budget, with only two managing to triple it (Lilo & Stitch and Brother Bear). And while they could blame changing audience tastes or whatever all they wanted, these films just weren’t good enough.

The live action side didn’t have too much better news. The cheaper family comedies were still bringing in solid returns. But on the live action side, only the Pirates of the Carribbean franchise had really hit. Another curious issue Disney faced was a gender imbalance. The company had always made its bread and butter from children and families. With its Disney Princess merchandising cash cow and Disney Channel franchises, they were doing relatively well in terms of appealing to girls. But on the boys’ side, nothing seemed to work. While part of me suspects this wouldn’t be seen as a problem if it were the other way around, it was definitely a big issue internally for Disney.

With everything going wrong for the company, Eisner was unable to hold onto power, and Bob Iger became CEO in 2005. Iger differed from Eisner in two important ways. Firstly, he’s much more willing to delineate to others and collaborate, encouraging a better corporate atmosphere. Second, he’s focused less on making great decisions than avoiding bad ones. While Eisner threw cash at big vanity projects like Disneyland Paris, Iger is very happy to spend, provided it feels like a relatively safe bet. Thus it was absolutely in his character that his first big move as CEO was to buy Pixar outright for $7.4 billon. No doubt it’s an awful lot of money, but it’s for a company with a very proven track record specifically with Disney. This both ensured the Pixar/Disney releases would keep coming forever and brought fresh talent to the in house animation division.

Creatively, Disney had finally found an answer to the Shrek problem. 2007’s Enchanted directly lampooned classic Disney elements as Shrek did, but also sincerely embraced them. Disney, as it turned out, could have it both ways. Audiences absolutely wanted to embrace the classic Disney tropes, but a more self referential style of humour made it feel less like an uncool relic. If this worked for an original idea like Enchanted, surely it would be a goldmine when paired with recognisable IP. So Disney decided to go for a slightly askew, self-referential take on a property they owned but had never quite made their own, Alice in Wonderland. Better yet, Disney had found the ideal director for a slightly stranger take on the property, Tim Burton, a brand unto himself.

Nine years removed from the film, Alice in Wonderland just isn’t very good. But it might have been the greatest case of being in the right place at the right time in the history of Hollywood. Avatar had just become the biggest hit of all time, and Alice was the next big offering with the hottest new technology: 3D. Did you like being transported to the immersive three dimensional world of Pandora? Well now Disney’s going to take you on an incredible journey to Tim Burton’s 3D vision of Wonderland. The film made a billion dollars worldwide despite no one being all that enthusiastic about it.

The other thing that happened at around the same time was Disney’s purchase of Marvel Entertainment. In a stroke, this solved the issue the company had in appealing to boys. But it also presented a new way of thinking about blockbuster filmmaking. “We thought if Iron Man and Thor and Captain America are Marvel superheroes”, Walt Disney Studios’ president of production Sean Bailey explained, “then maybe Alice, Cinderella, Mowgli, and Belle are our superheroes, and Cruella and Maleficent are our supervillains. Maybe if there’s a way to reconnect with that affinity for what those characters mean to people in a way that gets the best talent and uses the best technology, that could become something really exciting. It feels very Disney, playing to the competitive advantages of this label”.

Disney had its template to win audiences over: offer exactly what they had seen before, but with enough surface elements added that it didn’t seem “too Disney”. In Maleficent’s case, it meant the fairly creative change of shifting protagonist focus, but for the most part it was just very lazily making things look more realistic and explaining elements to make everything feel more grounded. With a world of filmgoers struggling in life and looking for easy nostalgia to make them feel better on the big screen, it was a licence to print money. Creativity be damned.

Two films in this “franchise” were then key. The first was The Jungle Book. It not only demonstrated the viability of CGI animals in a “photorealistic” style, but that there was value in marketing the technology. It’s the old trick James Cameron realised that audiences will come if they feel like they’re seeing some kind of new breakthrough. The other film was Beauty and the Beast. This one reminded Disney that while audiences love the classics, the 90s Disney renaissance era films hold another level of nostalgia over people entirely. The core audience is exactly the right age to have grown up with those ones.

Now, if only there were a film that could combine both these elements for some kind of hellish, uncanny valley guaranteed hit…

(I will write another part of this at some point, but I don’t know when.)