CINEMA: The Mouse Roars

The modern Disney cartoon feature is an adventure of the spirit — a guided tour through eruptive emotions. The Little Mermaid plunged briskly into the growing pains of a creature that felt as isolated from the shimmering haut monde as any Afghan peasant or Harlem street kid. Beauty and the Beast took a stroll in the woods with a fellow who needed lessons in the civilizing power of love. The Aladdin carpet ride revealed a whole grownup world of pleasures and perils to a young thief who started out in search of only a quick spin with a pretty princess.

Out of these excursions came show-business magic. Disney’s handsome fantasies satisfied as master lessons in the storytelling craft. They rekindled the art and emotion of the studio’s classic animation style; they showed Broadway what it had forgotten about integrating popular music into a potent story; and they reassembled the fragmented movie audience — these are pictures all races and ages enjoy. Fifty years from now they will probably be enthralling the grandchildren of kids who thrill to Dumbo and other Disney relics today.

In the process they have made enough money to please even Scrooge McDuck. Everybody from Disney renegades to Steven Spielberg tries making cartoon epics; Disney alone consistently succeeds. The studio, which issued (or reissued) only 12 of the 42 animated features that were released in the past five years, has grabbed 83% of the North American box-office take for the genre. (Aladdin has earned $1 billion from box-office income, video sales and such ancillary baubles as Princess Jasmine dresses and Genie cookie jars.)

At heart, though, Aladdin and its kin were the merest, dearest emotional travelogues. They alighted on a dream here, a resentment there; they poked at a feeling until it sang a perky or rhapsodic Alan Menken tune. Nothing was lacking in these terrific movies, but something was missing: primal anguish, the kind that made children wet the seats of movie palaces more than a half- century ago as they watched Snow White succumb to the poison apple or Bambi’s mother die from a hunter’s shotgun blast. Disney cartoons were often the first films kids saw and the first that forced them to confront the loss of home, parent, life. These were horror movies with songs, Greek tragedies with a cute chorus. They offered shock therapy to four-year-olds, and that elemental jolt could last forever.

Get out the Pampers, Mom. Get ready to explain to the kids why a good father should die violently and why a child should have to witness the death. And while you’re at it, prepare to be awed at the cunning of a G-rated medium that brings to bright life emotions that can be at once convulsive, cathartic and loads of fun. In The Lion King, premiering in New York City and Los Angeles this week and opening around the U.S. on June 24, primal Disney returns with a growl.

The studio’s 32nd animated feature tells of a lion cub who loses his birthright to an evil relative before regaining both his pride and his, er, pride. The film has jolly moments, delicious comic characters and five songs (by Elton John and Tim Rice), all so simple and infectious that you could immediately commit them to memory even if you weren’t destined to hear them on tie-in commercials this summer for Burger King, Nestle, Kodak and General Mills. And yes, there’s the hilariously extravagant production number that climaxes with whirlwind editing and a stupendous pyramid of pelts. With all this, The Lion King is almost guaranteed to be one of the huge hits of this bustling movie season.

Directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, The Lion King is a film of firsts for the studio. “It is our first cartoon feature not based on a fable or a literary work,” says Disney movie boss Jeffrey Katzenberg, who has overseen the animation unit since he joined the mouse factory in 1984. “It’s the first where there’s no human character or human influence. Our animators went back on all fours, and they’ll tell you it’s 10 times harder to make an animal talk and be expressive than it is to do that with a human.” Nor is it easy to study a 500-lb. lion close up, as the directors and animators did (“The handlers tell you not to wear cologne,” says Minkoff, “and not to dress like a zebra”). But the real challenge was to relate a moral tale of aristocratic dignity, and to do this in a pop-cultural era when feel-good facetiousness reigns. Comedy is easy these days; majesty is hard.

Not since Bambi has so much been at stake in a Disney tale. There are kingdoms to be sundered, deaths to be atoned for. The father of a prince is killed, and his conniving uncle seizes the throne; driven from the kingdom, the lad leads a carefree life until the father’s ghost instructs him to seek honorable revenge. Put it another way: a boy leaves home, escapes responsibility with some genially irresponsible friends, then returns to face society’s obligations. The Lion King is a mix of two masterpieces cribbed for cartoons and brought ferociously up to date. On the grasslands of Africa, Huck Finn meets Hamlet.

The hero is Simba (voiced as a child by Home Improvement’s Jonathan Taylor Thomas and as an adult by Matthew Broderick). This cub is the headstrong son of lion king Mufasa (James Earl Jones) and nephew of the green-eyed Scar (Jeremy Irons), who with oleaginous irony hides his intentions to kill Mufasa and Simba and become a low-down, schemin’, lyin’ king. After Scar engineers Mufasa’s downfall in a wildebeest stampede, Simba slinks into exile and away from duty, until at the urging of his father’s spirit and of his friend Nala (Moira Kelly), the young lion returns home to challenge Scar and renew the circle of dynastic life.

Every Disney cartoon drama is laced with intoxicating comedy, with harlequins and hellcats. From Pinocchio on, the villain makes use of a sly sense of humor and a few goofy abettors. Scar, whom Irons plays with wicked precision as the purring offspring of Iago and Cruella De Vil, hires a pack of hyenas as his goons: clever Shenzi (Whoopi Goldberg), giddy Banzai (Cheech Marin) and idiotic Ed (Jim Cummings), who says little but is happy to chew voraciously on his own leg. The hero’s helpers, who save Simba in the desert and teach him their live-for-today philosophy, Hakuna matata — Swahili for “What, me worry?” — are Timon (Nathan Lane), a streetwitty meerkat, and the lumbering wart-hog Pumbaa (Ernie Sabella). They chew beetles.

Lane and Sabella, veterans of the Guys and Dolls revival on Broadway, make up in dynamite comic camaraderie what they may lack in marquee value. “I have no idea if they considered major motion-picture stars for our parts,” says Lane pensively. “Do you suppose they were thinking of the Menendez brothers?” Lane loved the work, which involved mainly “acting silly for several hours and trying to make the directors laugh.” Irons also enjoyed the spontaneity of the process. In animation, words come before pictures, so improvising actors help develop characters and dialogue. “It’s extraordinary,” Irons says. “It’s as though the animators, the writers and the performers are all creating at the same moment.”

The directors and animators, though, create for years. That takes teamwork, discipline and sustained passion. “The creative process is usually thought to be an individual inspiration,” says Michael Eisner, who runs the Disney empire. “And that’s true if you’re sitting on Walden Pond writing an essay or a poem or short story. But this is a different kind of creative form, even more so than a regular movie. I can’t point to any one person and say, ‘If it were not for him, we wouldn’t have this movie.’ But I can point to a series of people.” Even the stars and directors are treated differently in a Disney animated feature, having traded huge salaries and profit participation for a chance to create dazzling popular art.

Eisner might have cited Katzenberg as the one man — the modern Walt, who does not create the story or draw the pictures but whose imprint is indelible in a million questions and suggestions, in his noodging and kibitzing, in refusing to be quickly pleased. Yet Katzenberg denies authorial status. “This is not me having a humility attack,” he says. “It’s just that the characterization isn’t true. If you want, you can call me the coach. When Pat Riley coaches a basketball team, they do pretty good. Yet the absolute reality is that Riley did not put one ball through one net for the Knicks this entire year.”

The Knicks reference is revealing. Katzenberg grew up in Manhattan, and in the Disney cartoons he has brought one of its institutions west. To state it bluntly: Broadway died and went to Disney. Pop went sour, and Disney smartly sweetened it. With Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman importing their Broadway savvy for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast (which completed the circle by opening as a Broadway show this spring), Disney reopened the franchise that Walt founded with Snow White’s dreamy Some Day My Prince Will Come. Last year the Menken-Rice A Whole New World from Aladdin won the Oscar for best song — the third time in four years that a Disney cartoon theme has won the award.

In The Lion King, Rice and John follow the Menken-Ashman formula. Music dramatizes moods (the first-act “I Want” song, when the young protagonist proclaims his or her dreams, is Simba’s bouncy, Michael Jacksonish I Just Can’t Wait to Be King) and prods the action (Hakuna Matata, which carries Simba from boyhood to manhood). The album just couldn’t wait to be a hit. Two weeks before the movie opens nationwide, the soundtrack is already No. 13 on Billboard’s pop-music chart.

Music can break hearts and make the Top 40. But a cartoon’s narrative imagination is first and finally in the images. Animation is a supple form; it can be as free as free verse, as fanciful as a Bosch landscape. The Lion King’s bold palette (blinding yellows and blooming greens to portray the savannah and high grass) cues subtle or seismic shifts in tone and character. Thanks to the devotion of nearly 400 artists, each shot registers its beauty and simplicity.

Seeming simplicity, that is. “When we do a film well,” says Walt’s nephew, company vice chairman Roy Disney, “we make it look easy, like a good golf swing. People say, ‘I can do that.’ “

Someday somebody will; Disney’s way is not the only way. Says Katzenberg: “On this planet today is another Walt Disney, waiting for that moment when his or her genius is going to produce something great, and competitive to us.”

Not as long as Disney monopolizes cartoon royalty with the likes of Simba and his ingratiating menagerie. In the world of feature cartoons, everybody else is a mere cat. Disney is the lion king.