At one point, the movie focused on a war between baboons and hyenas, with Scar, originally a baboon, manipulating Simba into a lazy king that could easily be overthrown. Originally pitched in 1988 as “ Bambi in Africa,” The Lion King evolved from King of the Kalahari to King of the Beasts to King of the Jungle over the years. “It was hard to gather people up, because people were more excited about working on more traditional Broadway films.” “It was hard to get people to work on it,” recounts executive producer Don Hahn. Off to the side was the long-in-development animal adventure project that would become The Lion King. As Timon and Pumbaa say in The Lion King 1½, the 2004 direct-to-home video classic: Before the beginning.įollowing the success of large, lavish movie musicals like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, Disney was working steadily on what was seen as the company’s next big success: Pocahontas.
Didn’t Peter Pan basically revolve around pixie dust? Don’t the 101 dalmatians cover themselves with soot?Īs it turns out, the story behind The Lion King’s dust is also the story of what made Disney’s 32nd animated feature so technologically spectacular: an instance when art direction drove the animation, which then drove Disney’s team to design a new level of special effects. This is clearly Hercules-destroys-the-Agora and Mulan’s-grandmother-crosses-the-street erasure, I thought. What did it mean? What was this “real” dust? Why were only four films mentioned? Surely there had to be other Disney films with dust. “This is the first time real dust was seen in a Disney movie. While perusing the Disney Wiki one breezy afternoon in March (as you do), I scrolled past a fact on The Lion King’s page that made me wheeze with laughter.