Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Lion King
1994 · Roger Allers · The Lion King on Sightlines
A brown seam shows along the lip of the gorge. It thickens. Then the whole rim is moving, and what pours down the slope moves like weather. Every animal in it takes its own line; none of them repeats another. Hold onto that detail, because it is the one thing in The Lion King that nobody drew.
Hand animation runs on poses. The animator finds the drawing that carries the meaning, the held attitude, the extreme, and the drawings in between exist to get you from one to the next. Deleuze opens Cinema 1 on exactly this distinction. The old understanding of movement, he says, works by privileged instants: motion summed up in a significant posture, the way a frieze sums up a battle. Cinema's modernity came from the opposite habit. A camera samples motion at equidistant moments, indifferently, and any instant it catches is as good as any other. He calls that the any-instant-whatever, and he thinks the whole art begins there.
Drawing was the holdout. Animation kept the privileged instant alive for decades after photography gave it up. Then, for one sequence in 1994, this film handed movement to a machine: the wildebeest were generated in 3D, their paths computed so that dozens of animals could run on individualized, non-repeating tracks, then dressed in a hand-drawn surface so they would match the world around them.
Look at what the film puts inside that herd. Mufasa has been a privileged instant since his first frame — low angles that monumentalize him, poster-flat silhouettes on the rock, James Earl Jones giving every attitude the weight of bronze. He dies inside a mass of any-instants-whatever, in motion no one posed. The most advanced thing in the picture is doing dramatic work rather than showing off. Death arrives as indifferent quantity.
Then the cut, and the film stops. Dust, the gorge floor, a cub pushing at a body that won't answer. Ivan Bilancio and Tom Finan put the longest stillness in the film directly after its fastest motion. Deleuze would call that held face an affection-image: a feeling registered with nowhere yet to go, not discharged into action. Velocity, then a face that can't move. That pairing is the film's emotional architecture in miniature.
What Simba does next is the second act, and it is where this lens earns its keep. He leaves and acquires a creed. "Hakuna Matata," in Deleuze's vocabulary, is the deliberate cutting of the sensory-motor link: you perceive a situation and decline to act on it. That severance was, for him, the great event of postwar cinema. He called it the crisis of the action-image — characters who can no longer respond adequately to what they see, the agent replaced by the seer, the one who watches and endures. Antonioni's people, waiting.
Simba in the jungle is a seer, and the film gives him the form to match: a single song carries him visibly from cub to adult, and nothing happens in it except that. Pure duration wearing a show tune.
So here is the case for reading this film through Deleuze at all. The Lion King knows about the time-image and treats it as an illness. Everything Deleuze prized in modern cinema — drift, the refusal of consequence, time felt for its own sake — is handed to Simba as a temptation, made warm and green and funny, then diagnosed as what he must be cured of. Even the one aperture that could open stays shut on purpose. Mufasa in the stars and clouds is not a dated flashback; it's an apparition with no memory to anchor it, a dream-image, precisely the kind of thing that elsewhere unhooks a film from its plot. And what does it say? Remember who you are. The paternal ghost urging remembrance, straight out of Hamlet, converting memory into a command to act in the same breath. That isn't timidity. It's the thesis: a 1994 restoration of the action-image, built at the exact moment the tools of the action-image were being replaced.
The rest runs the large form at full power, the shape Deleuze traced through the Western and the epic, where a situation encompasses everyone, presses, and finally forces the act that transforms the whole. The Pride Lands are the encompasser. Deleuze's word for the way a milieu and a character mark each other is the imprint, and here it is literal: Scar takes the throne and the land goes gray and sickly. Sovereignty and geography are one fact, which is what Pride Rock is for. A natural throne. The film's organizing relation condensed into a silhouette you could print on a poster — roughly what Julie Taymor later did with it on a stage. And the film breathes the way large-form films breathe: out to the Lean vista, a lone figure against a sunrise the size of a country, then in to the taut line of the chase.
"Be Prepared" does something else. Scar doesn't fight, he stages. Geysers, poisoned green light, hyena legions goose-stepping past a rocky rostrum while he reviews them from above: Triumph of the Will, quoted without disguise. Deleuze has a name for an act that becomes spectacle instead of deed — the attraction-image, where the figure stands in for the action. The hyenas are a dividual, a crowd given as one affective unit rather than a set of individuals. The villain is the only character who understands cinema as propaganda. He loses to a film that understands it as myth.
The debts are specific. Bambi gave this studio quadruped anatomy studied from live animals, and a parent killed offscreen as the load-bearing beam of a children's picture; both come over intact. The Little Mermaid supplied the Broadway spine, and "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" follows the "I Want" song beat for beat. Beauty and the Beast handed down the CAPS pipeline and the swooping virtual camera of the ballroom, along with Don Hahn himself. And Fantasia's "Rite of Spring" is the direct ancestor of the "Circle of Life" prologue: picture cut to orchestra, no dialogue, no protagonist for minutes at a stretch.
That prologue says the quiet part out loud. Deleuze, after Bergson, insists the whole is not a collection of things but an Open: a changing totality the frame opens onto and never contains. Most films only imply it. This one sings it in the first ninety seconds, names it the Circle of Life, and then shapes its montage as organic growth — a spiral that returns to the same rock with a different cub held over the same crowd.
One more thing, about why a drawn image can claim any authority. Bazin grounded cinema's credibility in the photograph: the image convinces because light actually fell on the thing. Animation has no such trace and no such claim. This film borrows one. Nature-documentary distance, epic horizon lines, a virtual camera behaving like a crane — the grammar of having-been-witnessed, laid over a world that was never there. That borrowing is Allers and Minkoff's real invention, and they made it on the picture the studio thought was the lesser of its two, with no humans in it and no romance at the center.
What it changed: it showed that a simulated crowd could carry grief rather than spectacle, and the studio drew the obvious conclusion. Within a decade hand animation was no longer Burbank's dominant mode. The 2019 photorealistic remake is the endpoint of that line, a whole film made out of what the gorge introduced.
So watch the gorge again and find the frame where drawing hands movement to the machine. Then ask the harder question. The film condemns Hakuna Matata as the mistake Simba has to outgrow. Why is it the stretch everyone remembers happiest?
Concepts in play
- any-instant-whatever — The gorge stampede: a herd generated in 3D and choreographed by computer so dozens of wildebeest move on individualized, non-repeating paths, then given a hand-drawn look — motion sampled indifferently rather than posed.
- privileged-instants — Hand-drawn key-pose animation and the film's operatic tableaux — the presentation of the infant Simba on Pride Rock, the low angles monumentalizing Mufasa — motion summed up in a significant posture.
- affection-image — Mufasa's death is cut for maximum shock and then held on Simba's grief, the editors allowing stillness after velocity: feeling registered in a face with nowhere yet to go.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — 'Hakuna Matata' as an escapist creed the screenplay explicitly opposes to the acceptance of responsibility — Simba perceives his situation and declines to act on it.
- voyant / the seer — Exiled adult Simba in the jungle, carried visibly from cub to adult inside a single song in which nothing advances the action — a watcher and endurer, not an agent.
- onirosign — Mufasa's ghostly manifestation in the stars and clouds — an apparition with no localizable memory behind it, whose 'remember who you are' converts vision straight back into a command to act.
- action-image-large-form — Tragedy-into-restoration: a disordered, blighted kingdom presses until Simba's return transforms the global situation.
- the encompasser — The Pride Lands as an ordered kingdom set against the graveyard and the gorge, with 'Circle of Life' as both cosmology and plot engine calling the act out of the hero.
- empreinte — Kingship as ecological stewardship: warm golds for the Pride Lands in balance, sickly greens and grays for Scar's blighted kingdom — sovereign and milieu marking each other directly.
- respiration-space — Alternation of Lean-style widescreen savanna vistas with a lone figure dwarfed against monumental sunrise, and the taut crane-like line of the stampede chase.
- attraction-image — 'Be Prepared' staged as a fascistic rally amid rising geysers, openly quoting Triumph of the Will's low-angle monumentalizing — Scar figures power as spectacle instead of acting.
- dividual — The goose-stepping hyena legions filing past Scar on his rocky rostrum, a crowd rendered as one affective unit rather than as individuals.
- the Open — The wordless 'Circle of Life' prologue, a sustained crescendo of establishing shots cut to orchestra with no dialogue, presenting the whole as a changing totality the frame opens onto.
- montage-organic — The film's spiral structure — the Fantasia-derived image-cut-to-orchestra prologue returning at the close with a new cub presented on the same rock before the same gathering.
- symbol — Pride Rock as a monumental natural throne that visually equates geography with sovereignty — one silhouette condensing the film's organizing relation, which is why it transferred so readily to Taymor's stage.