The Lion King Review

The opening is the whole argument. Four minutes, no dialogue, a sunrise and a title card, and the film has already established a world, a hierarchy and a stake. The animators were working at the top of the hand-drawn era, and the stampede combined a computer-generated wildebeest system with painted backgrounds years before that was routine. Scar is the studio's best villain design in decades, with Jeremy Irons playing him bored and theatrical and the animators giving him a slink that reads as contempt in every pose.

Hans Zimmer's score and Lebo M's vocal arrangements carry weight the screenplay has no time to build, which is why the elephant graveyard and Mufasa's death play far larger than their runtime. The weaknesses sit in the middle stretch, where Timon and Pumbaa reach for the easy laughs and the interlude flattens Simba into a passive figure for too long. Then Rafiki hits him with a stick and the film snaps back. Beautifully economical storytelling that never once stalls.