Long live
the king
arts & entertainment
(Top to bottom) Rafiki,
Mufasa, Sarabi, Nala, Simba,
Scar and the rest return in a
new 3-D Lion King.
20-year-old classic returns
ALL IMAGES © DISNEY
By Nancy Mills
THE LION IS still king. Wimoweh!
After four months of detailed tech work,
Disney is releasing a 3-D version of its mod-
ern classic The Lion King, putting a new gen-
eration of young viewers right into the
savannahs of storybook Africa. Scar (Jeremy
Irons) will scheme anew and Simba (Matthew
Broderick) will rise as before to take his place
in the great “circle of life.”
“The only reason to make it 3-D [was] to
enhance the story,” says Robert Neuman, who
supervised the 60 stereoscopic artists charged
with converting the 1,500 hand-drawn scenes
to 3-D. “We’ve given audiences a way to see
The Lion King differently.
“You feel you can reach right into this
reality,” he tells The Connection. “If you’re
interested in quality of picture and sound, this
will probably be the best presentation—3-D
allows you to see stuff you might not have
noticed before.”
“I’ve seen some 3-D films that weren’t
enjoyable,” Lion King co-director Rob Minkoff
says. “But when the conversion was completed,
I was very pleased: 3-D enhanced this film.”
When Disney started the four-year pro-
cess of creating the story of a young lion,
Simba, returning from exile to avenge the mur-
der of his father, Mufasa, by his uncle, Scar, no
one was thinking about William Shakespeare.
But when they were pitching the story, Minkoff
remembers, they realized “the theme is similar
to Hamlet. We had to figure out, ‘What is the
“to be or not to be” speech?’ After Simba sees
Mufasa’s ghost and Rafiki hits him in the head,
he decides to go back home. It works.”
Robert Guillaume, 83, who provided the
voice for Rafiki (the calm and wise mandrill),
insists that he wasn’t playing himself. “I’m a
hothead,” says the man who came to fame in
the 1970s in the TV series Soap and then
Benson. “I’ve tried my whole life to get a han-
dle on myself and my reactions to problems I
might have had.”
When he began work on the film, “I was
very skeptical,” says Guillaume. “I kept won-
dering, ‘How in the world is anything I’m doing
going to make sense in the story?’ But the
more I abandoned myself and the more free-
wheeling the character became, the more
sense it made.”
Jeremy Irons, 63, was performing
Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon when
Disney approached him to voice the villainous
Scar. “They told me I’d be playing the evil uncle,
a mangy, rather mean lion who frightened
young cubs,” he remembers. “He was some-
body not very happy in his situation.
Marin initially thought he would be play-
ing the title character but quickly realized, “I’m
not the kingly type. I have no long Shakespeare
tradition. Why else would you hire me if not
for comic relief?”
Marin, a Costco member, was surprised at
the film’s huge success. “When I first saw some
scenes, I thought, ‘Well, this is going to be OK,
I guess,’“ he says. “But then I was just amazed.
The Lion King is a very sophisticated movie. It
was such a big leap forward in animation. This
is not a cartoon any more. And the music [by
Elton John and Tim Rice] really propelled it. It
translated to every country and every culture.
It was a perfect wave.” C
The Costco Connection
The Lion King is available in all Costco warehouses in a new 3-D DVD/Blu-ray version.
OCTOBER 2011 ;e Costco Connection 31
Nancy Mills is a Los Angeles–based journalist
who writes about film and TV for such publications as USA Today and The New York
Times Syndicate.
