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ARTS AND CULTURE

Disney's lost kingdom

  • 16 August 2024
The Lion King celebrated 30 years this past June. As the highest-grossing Disney animated feature of the nineties and arguably with the greatest longevity, including the third longest-running stage show on Broadway, I started to wonder why it struck a chord that so many of its contemporaries have failed to. Simba and I grew up together. I was seven when AH ZABENYA first burst onto the screen in 1994 with a rising orange sun. I holler along every time my kids are watching (have you ever seen a three-year-old express disdain?) When I was 10, Mum took me to The Lion King musical, which is still vivid in my mind: huge, colourful animal puppets in carefully constructed structures; the film was my gateway drug into the Disney universe. I had the soft toys, the video game and the posters.

Disney’s ‘Renaissance Era’, roughly 1989–1999, is a distant memory, and maybe there’s some nostalgia in the mix, but the films produced during this time, like The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Little Mermaid, Hercules, Mulan and Aladdin to name a few, had staying power. In contrast, their woeful 2023 anniversary commemorative film Wish barely broke even and created a stream of media babble, posing questions like, ‘The fallen kingdom: why has Disney had such a terrible year?’ and ‘Disney in the doldrums: What’s gone wrong at the Mouse House?’

Their stock prices have tumbled, and ever since Disney+ was launched in 2019, it ‘burned up’ $11.4 billion in operating costs, which haven’t paid off. This is in stark contrast to 2022, which saw a 22.7 per cent increase in revenue from the previous year. For a company worth 169.82 billion US dollars, these are not insignificant figures.

Is it a matter of ‘go woke, go broke’? Is it a mammoth corporate model buckling under its own weight? Or is the changing media landscape, from cinema to streaming, the cause of Disney’s recent lacklustre performances? These are important questions because Disney is essentially the canary in our cultural coalmine: if a once beloved brand pumping out iconic stories struggles to capture our hearts, what’s changed? Is it them? Or us?

In 1979, Marilyn Berg Iarusso, an assistant coordinator of children’s services at the New York Public Library, told The New York Times that there was little understanding of what makes a good children’s film. ‘Much of what is produced for children is condescending and silly,’ she
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