been thinking about just how good the lion king is as ive never had nostalgia for it (i was obsessed with tlk 1 and a 1/2 as a kid instead).
Disney never made a movie that grand in scope again.
A child experiences trauma, we're privy to entirety of it, the villain fully intends to kill that child (the villain being a family member the child trusted), child getting saved by accident right before dying of hunger and adopting a whole new philosophy to avoid his trauma with "unconventional" parental figures who were a great influence on him. He then reconnects with his past literally through love, something that grounds him, before it turns into a full-blown existential crisis because he can't fathom going back. And he does go back! Stops running away from his past, a literal line in the movie.
I really hate cheap criticisms about how its "unfair that lions are royalty" when it isn't 100% literal, the whole movie is about going from innocence to disillusionment to finding your place in the world back through being responsible for what you care about and who you care about.
People often say beauty and the beast is The Best one from the classics which is an opinion like any other, but the scope of that movie is much smaller and i just don't get it. I don't like pitting any art against each other because I fully believe everything should be appreciated on its own terms, but in this case, TLK is the grandest movie they've made.
And the Mufasa speech criticism is also nonsense. What else was he gonna say? They need to kill other animals to live and it's natural that some form of "justification" arose to protect the mind