I assumed that the answer to the above question was “yes.” (And I have to admit here that I’ve never seen this movie or its live musical version. Our family has never been great fans of the Disney animated features, with the exception of Beauty and the Beast. But maybe now I’ll watch it, because I’ve gotten very intrigued by its creation.) So anyway, The Lion King has the distinction of being a Disney animated film based on an original story rather than a known source. Disney has acknowledged, however, parallels to the stories of Joseph and Moses from the Bible and to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. There has indeed been some discussion online that the Mali legend of Sundiata is a source, but no one has come up with any definitive evidence of that. One interesting blog post says,
Stories of jealousy and conflict over royal succession are common across a number of cultures, and while I defer to more knowledgeable sources as to whether The Lion King is a fitting tribute to or a reductive distortion of African cultural traditions, I don’t see evidence to support your claim that the story was “stolen from the Mali people.” (from “Was ‘The Lion King’ Story Based on the Mali Legend of Sundiata?” in theTwin Cities Daily Planet.)
When I mentioned this topic to my son he said that there’s a Japanese anime story called “Kimba the White Lion” that also bears a strong resemblance to Lion King. Don’t know that any of this has anything definitive; I’d say probably not.
Here’s where we move into my perennial question: Where did the idea come from to make the film, regardless of the roots/inspiration/sources of the original story? As always, the ultimate question isn’t knowable, but I find it very suggestive that (according to our source of all knowledge Wikipedia) the idea first came up in a 1988 meeting among three top Disney executives (including Walt’s son Roy) as they were working on the promotion of the film Oliver & Company, a cat-and-dog-based version of Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist. So did one of those three guys say, “Why don’t we move on to a lion-based story”? Seems logical to me!
On to the specific arrangement that I have sung with my own choir, which draws from two musical sources in the film: the Zulu chant “Nants’ Ingonyama” by the South African composer M Lebo and the actual song “Circle of Life” with music by Elton John and lyrics by Tim Rice. It amazes me sometimes to read about how many people can be involved in a creative endeavor. So Elton John didn’t do the actual score; that is, he didn’t do the orchestration. That task fell to a German composer named Hans Zimmer whose work on the film won him the Oscar for Best Original Score in 1995. Therefore, John and Rice come up with the bare bones—the music and the lyrics—but someone else had to put flesh on that skeleton. Certainly one composer could have done the whole job. It would be pretty funny to think of Mozart, say, going to, oh, I don’t know—Salieri?–and saying, “I have this great tune. Can you orchestrate it?” But this sort of thing happens all the time, especially these days, and especially in film work.
I was quite tickled to read the actual translation of the Zulu chant. Wouldn’t you think that it would be something philosophically profound? But no. The line that’s repeated over and over, “Ingonyama nengwe nama bala” simply means “A lion and a leopard come to this open place.” I did some looking online but was unable to find anything that points to a deeper meaning. So I guess everyone, singers and audience alike, can just enjoy the fun of singing the sounds. The arranger of the version my choir sang, Audrey Snyder, gives the advice to practice the chant’s words until “you can do it without thinking.” (And I’d point out that, with Snyder’s arrangement, there’s now yet another layer of creativity being added to the original.)
Here’s a performance of Snyder’s arrangement by a high school choir (with a human stumble included):
Here’s a video by the Ndlovu Youth Choir of this song (by a different arranger than the one referenced above), and if you can watch this without getting a big smile on your face and tapping your foot, well, I just don’t know what to say! (This is clearly some sort of dress rehearsal, as it’s in an empty theater, and the sound crew forgot to turn the mikes back on for the soloists at one point. Just do what they say in The Pirates of Penzance and “look over it.”)
© Debi Simons
