With “The Lion King” now playing in 3D, it has provided another chance to reflect on the film’s vast legacy. It remains the biggest hand-drawn animated movie of all time and spawned one of the biggest Broadway musicals of all time- which in turn launched director Julie Taymor to make Broadway infamy with “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.” It gave Elton John even more No. 1 hits, turned “Hamlet” into Disney fare, and has moments and catch phrases that still live on in pop culture.
But one of the longest lasting influences of “The Lion King” is how it turned practically every animated movie since into a star-studded affair. Before the early 1990’s, animated movies didn’t need celebrities to do the voices. Yet 20 years later, there is barely an animated movie character that isn’t voiced by a mega star or at least a well known actor.
The start of that trend is generally credited to the previous Disney film “Aladdin” and how Robin Williams turned it into one of his stand-up routines. Even before then, “Beauty and the Beast” had notable voice actors like Angela Lansbury and Jerry Orbach to sing some of its famous songs. But those films still had relatively unknown actors, Broadway talents and smaller stars to fill many of the key voices.
“Beauty and the Beast” had little known Paige O’Hara to play Belle, and Scott Weinger, Linda Larkin and Jonathan Freeman were the actual leads besides Williams and Gilbert Gottfried in “Aladdin.” Yet when “The Lion King” came out in 1994, it was the first animated movie in which practically every single major character had a famous voice attached.
The list stretches from James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons, Matthew Broderick, Nathan Lane, Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin to Rowan Atkinson, Moira Kelly and Robert Guillaume. Even young Simba was voiced by young “Home Improvement” star Jonathan Taylor Thomas- who was on ABC, Disney’s future network. The celebrities weren’t the primary reason for “The Lion King” becoming massive, but from then on in, any animated epic that tried to match it needed a big name voice actor.
Gone were the days when less known figures, non-celebrities and long time voice actors could headline a feature length cartoon, as they became just as dependent on getting an A-list star as any other film. That isn’t the case all of the time, but it is more often than it used to be.
The vast majority of Dreamworks movies are dependent on getting major actors like Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy and Jack Black and making their characters just another extension of their personas. Pixar gets a big collection of stars as well, but they don’t need A-listers all the time and they even let their own employees and directors do scene-stealing voices.
These days, going in house and not needing headliners is much rarer than it was in 1994. “The Lion King” paved the way for it to be rare, even though its celebrities were a small part of why it became an empire onto itself. But it did have James Earl Jones provide his most famous voiceover work other than Darth Vader, further Nathan Lane’s career breakout, and let Jeremy Irons help turn Scar into perhaps Disney’s most sadistic villain.
If future animated movies would try to copy the formula of an all-star cast, there are worst casts to copy and worse films. But for those who are tired of seeing mega stars voice characters and overshadow them with their usual antics, they have “The Lion King” mostly to blame for starting the trend. Yet like many films that spawn a trend, it isn’t it’s fault if imitators aren’t able to copy it as well.