Happily Never After: The Lion King II- Simba's Pride

Strap yourselves in boys and girls, this is gonna be a long one.

Being a 90s kid, it’s hard exactly to imagine what a Disney before “The Lion King” had to have been like. In June of 1994, the film was released when I was 3 years old and, despite barely being able to comprehend it, was the first movie that I watched in a theater.

Ordinarily I gloss over primary beats of the original films on “Happily Never After” because, while establishing where I stand with them is important, the entire purpose of the series is about the legacy of these sequels, widely understood to be of inferior quality.

This time, we have a bit of a different occasion. Truth be told, “The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride” is the impetus behind “Happily Never After.”

Widely agreed to be one of the best of the direct to video Disney sequels despite being subject to a polarizing reception leaning towards negative itself, no matter where your opinion may lie on its final product, every praise worthy aspect and critical error cited for the movie is almost undeniably visible even on the most passive of viewings, which has always fascinated me even as a child, more on that later.

However, in trying to understand the strengths and weaknesses of this particular sequel, I found that identifying and articulating them required a far deeper understanding of its predecessor than any other film that I’ve watched for this project thus far.

More importantly, with “The Lion King” being the first piece of substantial storytelling that I’ve ever experienced in my life, I discovered just how hard it can be to figure out what really makes something tick when it’s such a fundamental piece of your understanding of fictional mechanics in ways that you may have never had to unpack.

If the box office records held by “The Lion King” are to be believed, recapping its plot would probably be a redundancy since you’re bound to know what it is by virtue of merely walking the streets within the last 2 decades but I digress. The story focus on Simba, a young lion cub destined to rule the animal kingdom of the Pride Lands.

His eagerness to inherit the throne becomes darkly answered when his father Mufasa dies in a wildebeest stampede engineered by his treacherous brother and Simba’s uncle, Scar, who successfully manipulates Simba into thinking that the accident was his fault.

Disgraced by his perceived involvement in the death of his beloved father, Simba runs away, only for the ghosts of his past and the terror of Scar’s rule to later catch up with him as an adult, forcing him to own up to his responsibility for the greater good or stay content in his newfound carefree lifestyle.

The film was released to acclaim by critics and audiences and from an outside glance, it’s fairly easy to see why; “The Lion King” is quite possibly one of the most stylish films of the entire “Disney Animated Cannon.”

The tribal flare of Hans Zimmer’s musical score perfectly punctuates the African flare of the Savanna inspired setting of the Pride Lands, which is brought to life with backgrounds so articulate and striking character designs that stay in motion so subtly that you could occasionally be fooled into thinking that even the still objects of the animators canvas were being animated.

It’s no wonder the story was successfully adapted into a commercial hit of a Broadway show either, as the production values lend themselves sensationally well to an almost stage-like theatricality with the character drama, resulting in a film that can be just as mellow as it can be bombastic and flashy.

“The Lion King” is an undeniable masterpiece of showmanship but story is something that I have always struggled to grasp its impact with.

It’s comparisons to Hamlet are often the first brought up in the appraisal of its apparently bold nature which I’ve always found to personally feel slightly superficial. Concepts of the Shakespeare drama are undeniable factors of the story but the overall structure of the movie follows a standard hero’s journey formula as opposed to the emotional heft and bitter sweetness of a tragedy.

At face value, there just aren’t a lot of complexities to the film’s moment to moment progression and a lot of what could have helped it feel a little more alive in the writing department gets substantially cut short by the movie’s singular prioritization of Simba’s perspective at the cost of seeing how the rest of the Pride Lands operate.

Delving a little more into Scar’s psychosis, building up Nala’s return to the central narrative,  and hammering in just how badly desolated the Pride Lands have become would have gone a long ways towards upping the stakes and better fleshing out the setting to feed into its own desire to be a journey of epic proportions.

And lest accusations of me being a tad overly critical get lobbed out, I’m clearly not the only one that thinks this as a lot of material left on the cutting room floor from deleted scenes trend towards this. Even the highly successful Broadway show expanded the plot using these exact details as platforms.

The below clip is an admirable amateur animators personal side project, fully animating one of the deleted scenes in which a noticeably unhinged Scar proposes to an adult Nala to be his queen, reinterpreted in the Broadway show as the musical number “The Madness of King Scar.”

Something like this wouldn’t have taken more than 4 minutes to integrate and would the movie would have been far richer for it.

By now, I realize that it sounds like I’m coming off rather harshly on where I stand with “The Lion King.” I strive towards analyzing with an objective lens and from a stand point of story structure and even to a lesser extent, grandiose production values, it just didn’t seem to break much new ground with the rest of the Renaissance period that it was born from so loving something doesn’t amount to much unless you can really pinpoint why.

After mulling this over for a good month or so, I was almost ready to face the real possibility that perhaps “The Lion King” is one of the more overrated entries of the Disney Animated Cannon. Then, I had the fortune of discussing the movie with a friend of mine that brought up a point that I’d never considered; a point so simple yet subliminally effective that it led me to peel back layers of my own psychology of entertainment preference I never even realized were in place.

“The Lion King is a very emotionally complex movie,” he said.

In that one statement so much of “The Lion King’s” influence became clear. Perhaps the movie doesn’t quite match the depth of Shakespearean content but for a kid’s movie, it most certainly hits the emotional high notes.

Simba goes through a journey of substantially darker implications than the rough of conditions of the typical Disney protagonist; the trauma of death, the abdication of responsibility in response to questioning personal identity, and the general weight of the personal conflicts impact on the land and animals that inhabit aren’t just heavy but stacked together are generally a little bit more sophisticated than the conceptual approaches of the company’s best at the time.

“The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Fox and the Hound,” and countless other Disney films of high quality execution tend to have their storytelling and conflicts narrowly focused on the themes propelled by the main cast; seeking love beyond shallow and superficial aesthetics, seizing life and its joys without allowing the comforts of familiarity ward you off, don’t let your place in society determine the people that you care for, etc.

What makes “The Lion King” so compelling is all of the strong production applied to a narrative that you can’t quite peg down as being about a single particular theme up front. Simba’s journey takes quite a few turns in life that sees him making an evolution into 2 different characters; a scarred but aloof slacker that runs away from his problems and the hero that the Pride Lands needs him to be, while also having him existentially grapple with what he wants independent of the demands of the plot that he finds himself embroiled in.

Where the movie stumbles, and perhaps where my own misguided assessment of its dismissible simplicity comes in, is the anticlimax of his rebellion that seems to turn everything around within the span of a few minutes by virtue of his mere presence occupying the same space as Scar’s.

While it may seem like an insignificant detail in service of a standard ending, the fight between lionesses and hyenas topped by the final showdown between Simba and Scar are so sparse in the way of either spectacle or drama that they serve as a weak finale to an otherwise excellently paced story in which the understanding of those aforementioned emotional complexities, frame the theatre-esque staging of its shots as adding a sort of regal weight and grandeur to an ambitious but sadly uneven character narrative.

However, as I now think back upon the strength of what the film actually does do right regarding immersion, clear character narratives, and world building through the power of strong production and overall direction, it brings a smile to my face when I think about how much of my own tastes have clearly been impacted by it in ways that I had never realized in my 26 years of life until now, from a subtle affinity towards character emphasis and political intrigue, to a more overt love of the niche territory of xenofiction.

I don’t know if I’ll ever quite love “The Lion King” the way that the rest of the world seems to but I can’t deny loving it nevertheless.

So where does that leave its sequel?

Scar’s reign has ended and Simba settles into the throne with his mate Nala while cleaning up the loose ends of his uncle’s disastrous tenure.

Said loose ends include a pride of Scar’s former loyalists, exiled from the Pride Lands for refusing to conform to Simba’s new order led by the former king’s devoted follower Zira. She struggles in the resource deprived Outlands to raise 3 children and lead an eventual revolution against Simba and plans to make her son, Kovu, the tip of the spear.

Her plans hit a bit of a snag however, when Kovu’s efforts to infiltrate Simba’s pride undercover leads to him falling in love with his daughter Kiara, forcing him to question his loyalties and all that he believed about the brutal king that he had been taught to revere his entire life.

Similarly to “Aladdin and the King of Thieves,” “Simba’s Pride” has earned a well deserved reputation as one of the better conceived of Disney sequels. “The Lion King’s” fairly clean wrap up tries to sweep a lot of potential story content under the rug, so the creativity of its direct to video sequel to develop itself out of the original’s unmentioned plot holes would appear to be a major mark of good things to come. And indeed, many of the movie’s best elements come from the firmness with which it was conceived.

Seeing Simba go from a headstrong carefree child to tempered ruler and constantly worried father demonstrates a sort of full circle character development that I froth at the mouth for out of longer term formats of storytelling that don’t come around very often, so seeing it unfold well in film is just a downright delight.

The real stars of the show however are the lions of the Outlands. Zira’s inner circle is composed of her family, sons Kovu and Nuka and her daughter Vitani, who share a dynamic that is definitively familial in nature but just as poisonous as one would expect from a family led by a psychopathic worshiper of an unstable and insecure narcissistic sociopath.

The details of this family are so disturbingly accurate to a dysfunctional familial unit that it puts some adult dramas about subject matters of favoritism and Stockholm-esque abuse cycles to shame. My jaw dropped as a kid at the handling of a certain character death in this movie and even as an adult, watching it leaves me a little shaken, especially when further context is added to it by an extended deleted scene.

And none of this even touches on the chilling “My Lullaby,” Zira’s song to lull her son and future weapon against Simba to sleep that is one of the most twisted villain songs that Disney has ever conceived of (written by Joss Whedon). I adore it to pieces.

You’d think with so much going for it in so many key areas that “The Lion King II” is one of the few unabashed successes of Disney’s direct to video sequels. I guarantee you dear reader, that I wouldn’t have rambled about my existential appraisal of “The Lion King’s” legacy were that the case.

Where “Simba’s Pride” is sunken almost 100% is in overall execution. Unlike the other DTV sequels, this one has a screenplay that actually had thought put into it that couldn’t be entirely replicated by a creative kindergarten student but it sadly is sacked by glaring technical flaws and choices that fail to capture the majesty of the original and some of the most utterly blasé direction that I have ever seen in an animated film.

So much power is sucked out of the punch of many of this movie’s major setpieces simply because the director didn’t seem to know how to manipulate visual cues to his advantage.

Perhaps the best way that I can visualize this is via example; the below clip of Nala stalking Pumbaa is very striking in its animation and editing, showing the lioness’ neutral facial expression obscured by the grass that hides her before quick cutting to Pumbaa’s fear and subsequently leaping into action, transitioning to a look of ferocity on her face.

It’s sharp, incites elements of mystery and fear, and carries narrative momentum forward that leaves an impact when she and Simba reunite amidst the chaos of misunderstanding.

Compare this to a similar scene, introducing Zira to the audience for the first time in the video below beginning at the mark of 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

The clip subsequently leads into a standoff between Zira and Simba but notice how flat and lacking in ceremony or tension the reveal is. The animators don’t even try to shroud her in shadow.

She’s the primary villain of the feature and perhaps one of the most underrated villains in Disney history and her first appearance isn’t even menacing. This lack of imagination basically plays out across the entire film and dampens material that may not have been inherently great but was ripe elevation.

Its impact can be felt in ways large and small, from the failure to really make Kiara stand out aside from being a Simba gender swap as a cub and more or less a romantically themed plot device as an adult despite being billed as a main protagonist, dragging down the narrative impact of the movie, to extremes such as an adult Kovu rescuing his love interest to be from a fire that she had already escaped. Scenes like this are so laughable that I started legitimately questioning if the movie was put together by interns.

I would of course be remiss to not also mention that, like its predecessors in this DTV line, “Simba’s Pride” was clearly a testing bed for new animation technology, this time featuring heavy dosages of Flash animation alongside the traditional drawn animation. It clashes. Horrifically.

It’s like watching a theatrical feature suddenly get replaced by a low rent juice box commercial before restoring production values to that of a Saturday morning cartoon.

Between a non-visionary director and a technically inconsistent production, the movie has a lot working against it despite its heart clearly being in the right place but what may have unfortunately sunken it is somewhat surprisingly, the music.

Individually most of the musical tracks are okay but the score lacks the African flare that Hans Zimmer successfully injected into the original that really helped to uniquely characterize its story and setting. Despite a highlight or two, the aforementioned “My Lullaby” being one of them along with “He Lives in You,” a piece so good that they had to recycle it for the Broadway adaptation, the music just contributes to the whole thing feeling like some sort of generic fantasy adventure.

There’s even more that I could go on about from Kiara’s flat characterization to Timon and Pumbaa’s comedic decay from tolerable to insufferable but I think I’ve gotten the point across by now.

“The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride” is one of the best direct to video sequels that Disney has produced by sheer virtue of actually trying to make a good movie. That very fact unfortunately makes it simultaneously one of the most disappointing to actually assess.

I’m privy to some of the horrors that are to come in looking through these movies so it almost brings me to tears to have to tear into this movie the way that I do for actually taking enough pride in itself to put forth real effort.

Unfortunately, the end result of “Simba’s Pride” comes off as a crew of trainees getting their first shot at the big time that just needed to learn from the experience. Its earnestness puts it well above many of the movies covered and to come but can’t put them up to the standards of the legacies that their playing with.

Now if you’ll excuse me, it would appear that “The Lion King II” has produced a mess this weekend that I’m going to have to help clean up with the rest of the internet. "Happily Never After" will return later for a trip Under The Sea.