WHY YOU ALWAYS LION?

Hope everybody had a great Inauguration Day.

On Inauguration Eve, Donald Trump, Jr. posted this comparison between incoming President Joe Biden and Scar, the villain of Disney's The Lion King, on Instagram:

I'd like to set aside the obvious silliness--that Biden "cheated to win"--and ask Junior a different question: Who, in this "analogy," are the hyenas?

Back in 1994, when I reviewed The Lion King for Phoenix New Times, the 32-year-old pedantic ass I was spent interminable paragraphs trying to show off my supposed great Shakespearean acumen by tediously noting all the allusions to the Bard in this and other Disney animated flicks of the period. I didn't get to what should have been the point of the review until the last couple of graphs, and even there I let the movie off too lightly for it.

Specifically, I should have given more emphasis to how hard it is to escape the interpretation of The Lion King as an allegory (probably unintentional) in support of racial--or, at the very least, nationalistic and aristocratic--purity. Much was made at the time that this was the first truly original Disney film; that it wasn't based on some fairy tale or novel or other such source. Yet what they came up with was, as in the Star Wars flicks, one more tired-ass tale of a prince destined to rule as a birthright.

Even back then, though, what I found still more disturbing was the matter of the hyenas.

The usurper Scar invites the hyenas to integrate the lion pride, a sure sign of his wickedness. Two of them have overtly "ethnic" characterizations, voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin. A third, performed by veteran voice actor Jim Cummings, appears to have some sort of disability. It's this diversity that wrecks the integrity of the pride under Scar. The filmmakers seemed to be uncomfortable with this implication themselves, since toward the end there's a heavy-handed shot of the hyenas goose-stepping. This touch now seems like a classic reflexive right-wing projection, a meme tactic, like putting a Hitler mustache on a picture of Obama.

I closed my review back in '94 with the observation that "...if The Lion King weren't so obviously good-hearted...it might have seemed like the jackboots had been placed on the wrong paws." I can remember people I knew back then rolling their eyes at this mild suggestion as being overthought and tiresomely "politically correct" of me. But the 58-year-old pedantic ass I've grown into now wonders if I didn't take this insanely popular movie too little to task.

So, again, I'd like to ask Don Jr., who would have been about 16 years old when The Lion King came out: Who, in your view, are the hyenas?

Also, does this mean you see yourself as Simba, destined to rule after throwing Biden off a cliff?

HOW DARE THEY

Opening this week:

Nerve—Emma Roberts is Vee, a straight-laced Staten Island high schooler who becomes a “Player” in the illicit online game of the title. Play involves taking, and video-recording, outrageous, often extremely dangerous dares, in return for money and views by “Watchers.” Vee thinks she'll take one dare as a lark and to prove to her friends (and to herself) that she's not so square. But then she meets Ian (Dave Franco), a motorcycle-riding Player, and the ante, both in money and peril, keeps getting upped, and before long she's riding through Manhattan on the back of his bike while he's blindfolded, or crossing a ladder extended between two buildings.

Early on, we're invited to share Vee's fun and exhilaration at her first few relatively harmless dares. As the story progresses, it grows more sinister and suspenseful. At least until its rather improbably epic finale, Nerve, directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman from a script by Jessica Sharzer (based on Jeanne Ryan's novel) is well-paced and engagingly acted—it has the potential to be a minor teen-flick classic.

But there's a worrying side to this. While they usually aren't on this scale, idiotic dares among teenagers are a very real thing. I hope that the target audience here doesn't ignore its cautionary side in favor of the glamorized risky behavior. The idea of attempting to act out this movie in real life could get on any parent's last...well, you know.

Life, Animated—The life in question in this documentary is that of Owen Suskind, the younger son of Wall Street Journal writer Ron Suskind. Owen stopped speaking when he was three years old, was diagnosed with autism, and seemed only to be pacified by watching Disney animated films. Gradually his family realized that his movie watching wasn't mindless self-stimulation; he used the characters and conflicts to make sense of his own life, and this enabled him to re-engage with the world.

Directed by Roger Ross Williams from Ron Suskind's like-titled book, the movie is initially heartbreaking, then thrilling. We soon see that what Owen does is only a slightly more extreme version of what many of us do with, say, Shakespeare, or Marvel Comics, or Star Trek—use them as an allegorical shorthand for our own life challenges.

Owen has a fine screen presence, with hints of an ironic sensibility, as in his offhand use of effusive adjectives. But he also has a straightforward lucidity, especially in the face of sadness, that's highly admirable. And he has the soul of a storyteller himself—his own hero narrative, about a boy protecting the Disney sidekicks from a mind-clouding villain called Fuzzbutch, is stirringly rendered in this movie by the French animation company Mac Guff.

Owen's adoring parents and older brother also make a deeply touching impression. And a word should be said for Ron Suskind's performing skills—when he recounts imitating Iago, the nasty little parrot from Aladdin, as the first time he used a Disney character to connect with his son, he does a pretty respectable Gilbert Gottfried.

Phantom Boy—While we're on the subject of French animation: This French-Belgian co-production by Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli (the guys who made 2010's A Cat in Paris), is a gem. Set in New York, it follows title character Leo, a gravely ill boy who has learned to leave his own body and zip around the Manhattan skyline.

In this manner Leo helps a hospital-bound young police detective and a Lois Lane-ish reporter outfox The Face, a super-villain so called because his mug resembles a Picasso portrait (he's voiced here by Vincent D'Onofrio; the voice cast of the English version also includes Fred Armisen and Jared Padalecki). The movie's best comedy arises from The Face's attempts at high villainous flourishes, undermined by his doltish henchmen and his hapless dog Rufus.

The story elements have the familiar flavor of old-school cartoons and European kids' adventure books or comics, but they're wittily recombined here—Tintin meets Casper—and the two-dimensional drawing of the characters, with their simplified, dot-and-dash facial features, is effective. Better still is the rain-on-the-sidewalk atmosphere of the settings. There's a light touch to this movie, an un-fussy feel that it's not oppressively overproduced. It's refreshing.

OFFICER JUDY

Opening this week:

Zootopia—The title refers to a city that looks like a theme park, with frozen tundra, desert, rainforest and other ecosystems all conveniently connected by highway exits. The inhabitants, you see, are animals—anthropomorphic, bipedal, civilized mammals of every sort, from pachyderms to rodents, living side by side.

It’s not Utopia, however. Inter-species tensions continue, especially between predator and prey species, and there are glass ceilings in certain professions. Our heroine Judy Hopps (voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin), for instance, is a bunny who has internalized the high-minded idea that “Anyone can be anything,” and she wants to grow up to be a police officer, normally a job for the likes of tigers and rhinos and cape buffalo.

Through determination and resourcefulness, Judy realizes her dream, but as with many pioneers, she gets stuck with traffic duty. Before long, however, she’s caught up in a mystery involving missing predators, and develops a tense alliance with Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a wily vulpine con artist.

The buddy-picture plot that ensues is surprisingly dark and noir-ish at times, and in some ways Zootopia is one of the least sentimental Disney movies I can remember. It’s fraught with unmistakable racial and class subtext, and although it has the struggling underdog protagonist standard to animated features, it honestly grapples with the complex and painful realities behind the believe-in-yourself platitudes of the genre. Thus, the movie’s ultimately positive conclusions feel hard-won, and all the more uplifting.

Zootopia is delightful, but I did have a complaint: the freakin’ 3-D. At least at the screening I saw, it dimmed and washed out the images, and added not one effect that I thought was worth the eyestrain. See it in old-fashioned 2-D.

In case anybody still cares, a few notes on the Oscars:

It was gratifying for me to see the number one movie on my Top Ten list, Tom McCarthy’s low-key powerhouse Spotlight, win Best Picture at the Oscars this year. It was even more gratifying to see the great, 87-year-old Ennio Morricone, who had never won an Oscar for Best Original Score (he won an honorary Oscar in 2007), take the statue for his superb music for The Hateful Eight. It makes up, sort of, for Morricone not even being nominated for his greatest score, for 1970’s Two Mules for Sister Sara.

But most of the satisfactions of this year’s surprisingly enjoyable Oscar show had little to do with the nominees, and more to do with the host. Interest in the Oscars was high this year, less because of any particular suspense as to who would win, and more because of what the great Chris Rock would say and do. While the telecast was glacially paced and overlong as usual, Rock, who had not too memorably hosted the show in 2005, brilliantly managed his tricky duties this year.

What made it a tricky gig was, of course, the controversy over the lack of racial diversity among this year’s nominees. Some African-American industry notables had boycotted the show, and Rock himself had been urged to decline the job.

His approach was marvelously disarming. From the very first line of his monologue, he attacked the subject straightforwardly, good-naturedly and in all directions—his jokes were at the expense of the Academy, the boycotters, and himself, and they ranged from daringly tasteless to thoughtful. A high percentage of them were genuinely funny, and all of them put the controversy into perspective, without disrespect to the validity of the boycott’s grievance.

Perhaps most amusingly, however, was that Rock wouldn’t let it go. I expected he’d try to dispense with the subject with a few jokes at the beginning of his monologue and then move on to a business-as-usual Oscars, but bit after bit kept coming back to it. The show was so single-mindedly devoted to the controversy that, ironically, it probably brought attention to racial inequities in Hollywood in a way that no number of minority nominations could have, deserved though they might be. And it seems pretty unlikely that this would have been the case if Rock hadn’t hosted.

A couple of disappointments: Names eyebrow-raising-ly omitted from the “In Memoriam” segment included Abe Vigoda, Geoffrey Lewis, George Gaynes, Tony Burton and Pat Harrington, Jr. Also, while the brilliant Mark Rylance entirely deserved to win Best Supporting Actor for Bridge of Spies, I still found it slightly disappointing—I wanted to see Stallone win for Creed. But I suppose it’s in the spirit of the original Rocky, where even though he didn’t win, Rocky triumphed just because he got to the Main Event.