Episode 159 - The Lion King (Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff, 1994)
The Lion King (Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff, 1994).
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
The Fantasy/Animation podcast returns for a brand new season with Chris and Alex marking the end of their summer hiatus with another trip into the magic of Disney’s animated features, this time to remember the pleasures of the pride lands and the circle of life held in delicate balance that propels forward the story of The Lion King (Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff, 1994) - the studio’s critical and commercial smash that has generated sequels, spin-offs, remakes, and highly-successful theatre show. Topics for Episode 159 include the place of the film within Disney’s broader corporate and creative history, including important distinctions between ‘typical’ and Classic Disney; computer graphics, digital VFX, and registers of self-referentiality; anthropomorphic agency and the limits (and instincts) of animated animality in the film’s rendition of its non-human protagonists; Rafiki as the ‘Magical Negro’ archetype; the complications of the film’s well-documented Fascist imagery and the racial politics of its coded casting; and how The Lion King navigates wider ecocritical concerns around the relationships we can (and do) have to the environment.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Lugo-Lugo, Carmen R., and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, 2009. ““Look Out New World, Here We Come”?: Race, Racialization, and Sexuality in Four Children's Animated Films by Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks.” Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies 9, no. 2 (April): 166–178.
King, C. Richard, Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo. 2010. “Animated Representations of Blackness.” Journal of African American Studies 14: 395–397.
King, C. Richard, Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo and Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo, 2010. Animating Difference: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Films for Children (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield).
Sammond, Nicholas. 2015. The Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wells, Paul. 2008. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.