the_dunk_tank

I have conflicted feelings on this reading of the Lion King. While I understand where you're coming from, I think listening to some of the writers on Lion King kinda shake this up. Lion King had a lot of black South Africans writing it. Here's a video that goes into Lion King's accidental implications extremely well. I'm not saying your interpretation is wrong by any means btw. Normally I kind of ignore author's intent, but I feel that if author's intent adds enough to the conversation to actually be interesting, it's worth discussing at least. They don't know what they subconsciously wrote, so interpretations that ignore author's intent are completely valid. Different story interpretations is what separates good from great stories imo.

BUT with that being said, let's go into what the authors have said. Simba is supposed to represent Nelson Mandela, while Scar and the Hyenas are supposed to represent the colonizers. The writers weren't trying the convey that it was "natural order" that kept the world in check (although I will agree that certain parts of the movie certainly do), they were trying to convey how South Africa was flawed before the Europeans took over, but it still generally worked. Even with oppression that was present in pre-colonial South Africa, every single person in their ecosystem has a place, every person has a stake in their world where they do care about what happens. The lions may literally kill their subjects because hungry, but the lions also want the other groups of animals to actually succeed because they don't want to just move to find another food source. Regardless of how problematic the lions in the movie are, they still care about their society and culture.

The Hyenas and Scar are supposed to represent fascist colonizers (hence the imagery being uncomfortably Nazi). The Hyenas do really want to eat, but they also want to be as powerful as Scar is, and their avoidance of wider society is in hopes of getting as powerful as Scar. The Hyenas do not want to find their place in the rest of society, they want to drain said society until there's nothing left because they like laying around all day and consuming the value of the prey without thinking about it. The Hyenas are the imperial core, perfectly content with eating nations like Iraq, but even hungrier than before after their bloody feast.

They may stand where Mufasa used to stand, but do not care about keeping the society running, they just want to do the eating (aka the aesthetics of power) I think the grey skies were a bit dramatic and uncommunicative, but also think it would be too harsh for a Disney movie to have the Hyenas begin a genocide against the native population. I feel like Lion King is critical of the "natural order" at times, with Simba depending on Timone (canonically, extremely Jewish) and Pumba although the natural order says he should eat them. Idk, with author's intent, I see Lion King as the allegory of Nelson Mandela being exiled, imprisoned, and using that time spent with "the lesser" to come back strong enough to see true revolution for his people. Mandela was transformed from being a dedicated but young and questionable revolutionary to one of the most effective revolutionaries through his time in prison, just like Simba's time in exhile.

The reasons I consider author's intent so heavily in this case are two-fold. A. It's just an interesting conversation. You can read everything I just wrote and disagree with every word, but I'm sure you're at least thinking about it. B. This isn't just a story of a revolution, this is an extremely personal story to many of these writers. This movie released in 1994. Mandela had just been released from 30 years of prison in 1990, after being sentenced to life in the 60's. Mandela was taken away from his people for decades, but still came back as one of the most important leaders in modern history. To the South African writers of the film, this was extremely recent history, and extremely important history. Mandela/Simba weren't necessarily supposed to be brought back into leading because of the divine right of kings, rather because their homes have been ruined by foreign invaders and someone with enough influence had to come back and try to restore their homeland. Cult of personality, as bad as it can be, has proven to be absolutely essential in revolution.

Maybe these South African writers do have absolutely batshit conclusions in politics, but it just makes their point stand even more. Regardless of how flawed Mandela may have been, he actually had a stake in the nation and wouldn't have just let the nation fail. Maybe he would have commited a few atrocities or abuses of power, maybe (not really, think hypothetical since Lion King was built for Western audiences absorbed in anti-mandela propaganda of the time) Mandela actually commited some serious human rights abuses during his rule. The Europeans would have let every person in the country die for a few million dollars because the survival/death of south Africa simply didn't matter enough to be built into an actual colony. I think that's the ultimate point of the film. It doesn't really matter how fucked up we see the circle of life professed to the animals of the area, foreign powers with no understanding of the land will kill the land because their plans don't require the land to survive, they want as much profit as possible as fast as possible. Africa (yes, switching to all of Africa right now because the history of imperialism is borderline universal) doesn't have enough important resources to actually be developed by capitalists, but they do have enough important resources to be consistently subjugated by capitalists. The only way to protect Africa is by letting its citizens run its own nations.