Notes

Did you know The Lion King was originally going to be called King of the Jungle.Jeremy Irons was reluctant to lend his voice as Scar. Simba and Scar were animated on separate coasts of the US.The wildebeest stampede took three years to create.If you’re like us, you can probably recite The Lion King word for word, song for song, and roar for roar. We sing car-karaoke with the soundtrack on the way to work, hold random objects above our heads to channel our inner Rafiki during meetings, and say “hakuna matata” any chance we get. All of that is normal right? Our completely reasonable obsession caused us to fall down a black hole of Lion King fact-finding Andreas Deja, Scar’s lead animator, was working from Florida. Meanwhile Mark Henn, Simba’s lead animator, was working from California. The team literally had to go back and forth to create some of our favorite scenes. The song was actually going to come later in the movie after Scar took over Pride Rock. As the story developed, it made more sense to have an evil plotting song. Bonus fact: this scene uses yellow light and dingy colors to create a feeling of an old newsreel from the 1940s. Rowan Atkinson (Zazu) didn’t know the lyrics to “it’s a small world.” He didn’t live and breathe Disney like we do. Atkinson actually had to learn and practice the lyrics for the scene when Zazu sings for Scar. Thankfully he picked them up quickly. Simba, Sarabi, Rafiki, and Pumbaa are swahili words. THE LION KING WASN'T ALWAYS THE LION KING.
The Lion King went through a few different titles, including The King of the Kalahari and King of the Jungle. "When I first started work on The Lion King, the movie was called King Of The Jungle,” producer Don Hahn said.

"King Of The Jungle was a metaphor for this allegorical story about human behavior," Hahn continued. "We were thinking about the idea of how it’s a jungle out there and Simba has to exist in this jungle. However, there was no jungle in our story; they’re out on a savannah. But then we threw that out because we wanted to focus on a simple story about a lion king. At that stage we thought, ‘Why not call it The Lion King?'"