Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List

Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #319: The Lion King

Disney’s “The Lion King” (1994), directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, is two spots ahead of “Aladdin” on Empire Magazine greatest movies list. It makes sense since it has once again all the elements of the classic Disney animated movies: great hand-drawn animation, themes of good versus evil, comedy sidekicks, cute animals, musical numbers and father issues. The story line in “The Lion King” actually tries to be a bit deeper by borrowing elements from “Hamlet.” If you are going to have a Shakespearean villain, you might as well have him voiced by Jeremy Irons.

Since Disney has always been keen to market its product on every platform as soon as possible, the first I saw of this movie was in an illustrated book before the movie itself even came out. Then after watching the actual movie of course my brother and I ended up renting the game for Super Nintendo and my parents bought the soundtrack on audio cassette. These marketing guys really know their thing. Since I was the age of the target audience at the time it came out, I can’t deny they were marketing a good product. My family and I saw the movie in theatres in Québec and liked enough to ask for the VHS tape to watch on a loop once we moved to Chile. Throughout our many moves in the 90s, we ended up hauling a lot of videotapes.

The lion has been described as the king of the savannah and in a Disney movie they take that literally. King Mufasa (James Earl Jones) rules over the Pride Lands of Africa. When his son Simba (Jonathan Taylor Thomas) is born he is heralded as the future king of the land, much to the dismay of his uncle Scar (Jeremy Irons), who has his eyes on the throne. While Mufasa is busy teaching his son the responsibilities of being a king and his whole circle of life philosophy, Scar is planning a coup.

Luring Simba in a gorge, he orders hyenas Shenzi (Whoopi Goldberg), Banzai (Cheech Marin) and Ed (Jim Cummings) to cause a stampede of wildebeest. Mufasa rescues Simba, but dies in the gorge with a little help from Scar. After Scar convinces Simba his father died because of him, Simba flees the land with the hyenas on his tail. They abandon pursuit figuring he will die all alone in the savannah. That’s the problem with henchmen in movies: they never get the job done.

Simba does manage to survive thanks to two of Disney’s funniest comedy relief characters: meerkat Timon (Nathan Lane) and warthog Pumbaa (Ernie Sabella) who rescue him from vultures. Seeing the advantage of befriending a lion, they take him home to their jungle to live under their own philosophy: Hakuna Matata, or “no worries.” So instead of growing up king of the jungle, Simba grows up with the equivalent of two hippies eating bugs and kicking back in the woods without a care in the world. Everything changes years later when the grown up Simba (Matthew Broderick) finds his childhood friend Nala (Moira Kelly) who tells him Scar has destroyed the kingdom by letting the hyenas run rampant. A vision of his father in the sky also reminds Simba of his rightful place in the land, so it’s time to go home and face the past.

The animation stands up even by today’s standards, the story is engaging throughout and Elton John wrote and performed some of the movie’s most memorable songs. As a child I enjoyed every minute and I imagine the adult audience did too as the humour works for all ages. Pumbaa even has a joke I did not understand until I saw Sydney Poitier in “In the Heat of the Night”: “The call me MR. PIG!”

Sadly there are also a number of controversies attached to the film, from the allegation the word “SEX” is at one point spelled out in the sky, to racial undertones because the hyenas are voiced by African-American and Latino actors who ruin the place once they are allowed in the kingdom. Talk about tainting a childhood memory. Can’t movies just be movies without all this politically correct bickering?

Whether or not there is any merit to the allegations, “The Lion King” is another Disney success story, spawning sequels, a Broadway play and even a TV spinoff for Timon and Pumbaa. Good for them, it’s nice to recognize the sidekicks. Just don’t call one of them a pig.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

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