Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Lion King
1994 · Roger Allers · The Lion King on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how low the camera sits when Mufasa stands on Pride Rock. (camera)
Allers and Minkoff keep putting Mufasa above the horizon line, held in poster-flat silhouettes and low angles. James Earl Jones matches it, letting every line land like bronze.
Payoff: Authority in this film is a matter of where the camera is placed, not what anyone says about it. In the reading: privileged-instants. Those held, statuesque poses are what the reading calls privileged instants: a whole character summed up in one significant posture.
Notice the color shift: warm gold, sickly green, then jungle saturation. (light)
The Pride Lands in balance are gold. The elephant graveyard goes green and gray. Simba's exile is drenched, lush color. The palette tells you the state of the kingdom before the plot does.
Payoff: Color here is information. You can read the health of the land off the screen at any moment.
Listen for the wordless voice that opens the film before any dialogue. (sound)
Lebo M.'s call arrives over the sunrise, and Zimmer's orchestra and South African choir carry the whole prologue. Nobody speaks for minutes. Picture is cut to music, not to a protagonist.
Payoff: The film sets its terms with sound and image alone, so you accept the world before you meet anyone in it.
Watch Simba grow from cub to adult inside one song. (cutting)
"Hakuna Matata" is built as a montage set piece. Time passes, geography compresses, and nothing happens except that Simba gets older and stops acting on what he knows.
Payoff: The film's warmest stretch is also its most passive one, which is exactly the trap it sets. In the reading: voyant / the seer. In the jungle Simba becomes what the reading calls a seer: someone who watches and endures instead of acting.
Listen to how slowly Jeremy Irons lets Scar's lines drop. (performance)
Irons plays every sentence as a bored aside, drawling past the beat. The animators keyed Scar's droop, his shoulders and his half-closed eyes, straight to that delivery.
Payoff: The drawn face and the recorded voice were built together, so the performance reads as one thing.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the low angles on Mufasa and Pride Rock. In this film, height is authority and geography is the throne.