I'm not gonna lie to you internet,I don' like The Lion King.I'm not saying that it's a bad movie,you might even say it's a pretty good movie.I dislike it on the grounds that nearly every compliment paid to the movie,the depth and scale of the story,the beautiful animation,the compelling character study,the great songs,etc.Is in my eyes is an exaggeration of the actual good qualities of the film.
The Good.
I said what I said and I meant what I said,The Lion King is by no means a bad movie.You have to admire the ambition of the film makers,telling an epic story for kids,utilizing new technology to create a cinematic experience.Scenes like the stampede subtly utilize 3D to create a sense of scale drama and danger.Hans Zimmer skilfully integrates an African fell into his imposing score.The skill of the animation and direction gives the feeling of scale,so that Simba's conflict feels grand and important.Emotionally the conflict is important,dealing not just with death but with guilt of patricide.This could be the foundation for a great film.My issue is that although the tone of a true epic is creating it doesn't have the intellectual background to support the tone.This isn't meant to be a comedy or a big dumb action movie,so the characterization and theme need to be pretty stellar to support the film.So despite the fact that it is some ways really well put together it doesn't fell as good as The Emperor's New Groove,whose conflict didn't need to work for the film to be hilarious.

The Characters.
This is my No.1 problem with the film.The story fails to be relatable because the characters aren't believable or sympathetic.The characters are only the most basic archetypes,the love interest and moral center,the foppish villain,the celebrity comic relief,etc.Nala seems to have little to no personality beyond being strong enough to tell Scar and Simba off.Unlike Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin,there's no reason for the main characters to to fall in love with each other.Nala doesn't have this because she has no character.Mufasa is an unreasonably cool father,with no faults to make him believable nor and depth to his character,and I'm just gonna say it,I never cried when he died even as a kid,Scar has no traits beyond evil laziness and general foppishness,and most of the other characters are comic relief with nothing beyond a role in the story and a comic part to play,normally based on typecasting a comic celebrity.
In the really good Disney movies comedy isn't something that isn't just delegated to specific characters.Maurice is a comic relief character but the comedy isn't just from him,but from his interactions with Gaston,who unlike Scar is a villain whose every action is darkly funny.Like the deplorable gargoyles from The Hunchback of Notre Dame,Timon and Pumbaa reek of being put in simply to entertain the really young kids(plus they never made me laugh)while the rest of the audience is interested in the real plot.This wouldn't matter if the jokes were funny.But.They.Just.Aren't.
The argument against this is that each of these characters is only important in relation to Simba(who was voiced by that idiot who said"That's a lot of fish"in the remake Godzilla) as the story is structured as a character study,charting Simba's growth into a man,uh larger lion.But I would argue that the lack of depth in the supporting cast,who are meant to use their interactions with Simba to give him depth,is part of the problem with Simba's character.Like the rest of the cast,Simba seems to have no traits beyond what the plot requires,which gives him more depth than his fellow players,but still not much.Simba is lazy and playful,but learns to accept responsibility for his actions.These traits could've been used to make an interesting character,but Simba isn't fleshed out much more than this.We don't know about his hobbies or habits,nor are given enough information to understand how he views the world in a complex way.Disney tried to make Simba into a three-dimensional character,with a backstory,and a view of the world which changes over time,but his view of the world is as simple as,wanting to be king,then not caring about anything,then caring about his country.

The Visuals
Given this,it's not suprising that the character fails to show off the other characters.One of the defining features of good character design is to make character features efficiently convey to the viewer who that character is.In Beauty and the Beast,even before we see how they move we can see that Belle is beautiful,modest and clever,where Gaston is arrogant,handsome and inconsiderate.Whereas in Lion King we can tell that Simba is...a lion,and Nala is...another lion,and Mufasa is...a larger lion.I suppose we could infer that Rafiki is wise because he looks kind of like a racist vision a witch doctor,if you squint.
Even the better designs only convey the broadest archetypical traits,Scar and the hyenas are evil,and Timon and Pumbaa are comic relief.By contrast you can tell a lot about Bagheera,Baloo just by how they look.For instance we can tell that Baloo is a big oafish fun-loving one and Bagheera is more physically more diminutive but more classy and serious.

The Music.
This is also another problem with the film,I don't like the songs in the movie,except for "Be Prepared".It also doesn't really work as a musical,and I would question the choice to make it one.Of all the songs in the movie only "Be Prepared" really holds up,despite how well-remembered "Just can't wait to be King"and"Hakuna Matata"are neither really great songs in my opinion."Circle of Life"works mainly on the strenght of Hans Zimmer's orchestration,but I feel as if it actually becomes worse when the singing begins.Not only that the songs don't tell the story like they do in other Disney musicals."Be Prepared"establishes that Scar is evil and wants to overthrow the king,but doesn't have the depth of "Gaston"or"Poor Unfortunate Souls",which act as a way to establish not just the villains scheme but how it related to their personality.We learn that Gaston is too proud to let Belle go,his views on gender,his compulsive need to be the best but also his views what makes someone good,and his station in the town;just as we learn about Ursula's views on body image,her need to get revenge on king Triton,her lying and manipulative habits,and her snobbish view of unfortunate people.Similarly"Just can't wait to be King"doesn't encourage us to imagine the protagonist as complexly"Belle"or"Part of your World"does.The Disney musicals after Howard Ashman died really suffer to depth and pathos his lyrics gave the characters.I feel as if The Lion King was only a musical by default,rather than being as conceptually bound with the formant as the other renaissance movies were.I'm sorry guys,but besides"Be Prepared"the rest of the songs don't do a thing for me at all.

What's with The Circle of Life?
Maybe I would like the film if all the characters did was carry big complicated ideas on their shoulder's,but Hamlet this ain't.And clearly this was the goal of the movie,what with basing it off Shakespeare and the use of epic cinematography and characters loudly exposing their ideology.Let's try to reconstruct what this film is about.
So Mufasa tells Simba about The Circle Of Life:where it's okay that bad things happen because that's life.So when Mufasa dies,Simba runs away from it rather than accepting it like a man.Timon and Pumbaa tell him that he doesn't need to worry about it and can stay a child forever,but eventually Simba learns to accept that Mufasa's death was his fault and that it's all part of The Circle Of Life,right?I assume is that idea is that Scar,is somehow also running away from his responsibilities,which by some cosmic process causes a draught.
This is highly problematic.Firstly,this gives us motivation to dislike the villains.Why should we dislike Scar,he feeds off Mufasa's death just as lions feed off antelopes?Why are the hyenas bad?They feed off corpses just like everyone else.The fact that we see no visible reason for Scar's reign to destroy the Pridelands is problematic because the story is meant to be about responsibility.Simba spends the whole film avoiding his responsibility in the death of his father but when he returns he doesn't have to take responsibility because it turns out that Scar was the one that killed him anyway.
Quite apart from the fact that the idea of The Circle Of Life is obviously not applicable in real life,I mean you should really avoid death,death is bad,so is killing,it's just so inconsistent with the rest of the film.What really happened is that Disney stole the structure of Hamlet,is okay they're not the first,and put some neo-pagan mystical philosophising in the beginninng which sounds really impressive.But the actual structure and content of the story are still based in the medieval concepts of divine right that Hamlet espoused.The lions are the true kings and by killing the king lion,and letting the lower beings of the Hyenas into the government,Scar,the Claudius lion,caused an upset in the natural order which meant that a terrible draught happened.The film celebrates the birth of the new king because they are the true line of kings and that's why there's a throwaway love interest,so that we know the line of kings continues.Again,a terrible message but the structure of the film makes much more sense this way.

In Summary What I'm saying is that the film doesn't work properly on all levels that these problems are related.In a film like this,the epic aesthetic reinforces the large-scale of the story,in terms of ideas but also in space and time.These large themes rest on the characters who are meant to convey the breadth(extent) and complexity of life and philosophies behind it through their interactions.However the feel can't feel sophisticated and relevant if the characters don't interact in an interesting way,or feel like real people.Similarly the animation can't convey the personality of the characters if the characters are shallow.
So how did this happen?
Well in James Stewart's book about the Eisner administration at Disney.DisneyWar,he says that The Lion King was initially proposed by Jeffrey Katzenberg,the executive in charge of the animation division under Michael Eisner.Stewart says he cried as he proposed the idea to a group of somewhat bemused animators.Stewart's and the other accounts tend to characterize Katzenberg as great making films successful,and being a ruthless executive,but really a storyteller.Although some at the time hailed him the new Disney retrospect it seems apparent that there was a huge wealth of underutilized talent in Disney animation as the Eisner administration moved in which was allowed to shine as the old guard of animators moved on.
My point is that the production was driven by someone who wasn't a storyteller,but had the vision of a large-scale story about large-scale ideas.Good animation and direction help the movie considerable but the film is flawed conceptually in that the concept was more to make a big growing up story about a lion king,than about The Circle Of Life.At the core,the film is what it wants to be,not about philosophy and society which a film with such an epic and serious tone should be.All in all,The Lion King could be considered a flawed gem,with big ideas and high production values,but when people tell me that it's the best Disney movie,I die little inside.

I'm sorry if I offended you somehow,I just wanted to express my opinion,not force it on everyone.It's just that I honestly never got why so many people loved this movie when to me,it's just another Disney movie.I know a lot of people really love this movie,but I'm just not of them.