Is the Lion king racist?

As an avid lion king fan I am so saddened to have recognised the ample amounts of racism I have now found in my all time favourite film, The Lion King (the first one that is). After thinking about what to blog about for this assignment I leaned towards wanting to bash Disney films, as there is just so many that are blatantly racist and display notions of othering and reinforce eurocentricism. I always thought Lion King couldn’t fall into that category though due to having a cast full of animals and it being set in an African context.  

Voices, context settings, facial features, character agendas and the films plot itself all display notions of othering and reinforce the classic Eurocentric perspective of the west and the rest.

Take Simba’s character verses his evil villainous uncle scar. At face value, there are already racist connotations being implied. Simba, although brown, appears to be  

  

a lighter shade of brown than his blood related uncle, scar. He is depicted as the protagonist and is apart of a pride rather than scars army of evil Hyenas. His Maine fits the typical matches the typical lion colour being red/brown so we can ask here why is it that scars mane must be black and for his coat to be dark brown? Of course its to signal out for kids who’s the baddie and the goodie but thinking through a Stuart Halls lens, One can pick up the blatant correlation this is making, black=bad and thus reinforces that black is contrasting to the good that is Simba and hey presto we have a racist connotation.

Moving on from character features, the context in which this film takes place you would think is far from racist. “Pride rock” is the home of Simba and his crew of lions who are again, all of lighter shades of brown. When Mufasa and Simba both rule the kingdom it is captured in a happy tone of light colours and birds chirping, sun shining and appears to be the hot spot in pride lands. In contrast to when Scar and his “army” of hyenas rule the land it is portrayed in dark gloomy shades, bad weather, trees dying and a not so nice place to hang out with all your lion friends.

Again these ideas are seen in the example of the lion pride versus scars evil team of hyenas

I want to look at the character of Rafiki now and how he is represented to be a comedic some what clown like character. What one can recognise here as inferential racism is his accent and demeanour of his character and that he is denoted as wise yet clown like, mentor yet crazy. We can see this through juxtaposing his accent to Simba and any of his pride members. Simba speaks in what one can only recognise as a white American in correct English prose. Whereas Rafiki utilizes Swahili sentences now and again, speaks in third person and appears to be wild and clown like. And according to Hall, this ‘clown’ character is one of many stereotypical characters often played by black coloured actors in films. Now for kids, he is hilarious and comedic but through a Hall perspective it can be argued he is a foreign character compared to Simba who is portrayed to have a white ethnicity, which can be deemed racist.  

Being a kids movie, these obvious contrasts are there to hint towards the plot of the story that is, for the good guy to overcome the bad guy and all the connotations are there to enforce that but what else is it reinforcing? The idea that black is the other/the bad/the evil is pushed in this film to younger audiences which goes onto reinforce the idea of Eurocentricism making ‘white’ values the focal point and everything else as the other is different. The fact that I could not pick up on these what seem so obvious racist traits and that I was oblivious to thinking Lion King was exempt from racist connotations links to Halls notion of inferential racism and that I myself am guilty of these western values that have become so normalised.

Although still my all time favourite film, I am genuinely annoyed at the amount of blatant racist connotations there are in Lion King.

Would love to here peoples thoughts on this!