Intro

It has been 24 years since the release of Walt Disney produced The Lion King but to this date film critics and many fans believe that there never has been a better film than Lion King in the animation circle. It is hard to argue considering the emotional value this film holds in our hearts. Released in 1994, Lion King became an epic musical animated series to steal all hearts.

It swapped a gross collection of 766 million USD all across the globe. Based in the kingdom of lions in Africa, Lion King was a story with all ventures of emotions.

Animation story

In the beginning of this film’s production, not a lot of people had faith over the project and the concentration on developing character models was fading. However, the producer convinced the animation team who was also working on a separate film at that time that this film is going to nail histories. Now we know how serious he was. The production started at Disney MGM studios.

Let us not forget that The Lion King was made in the 90’s. The technology to develop animated characters and animation in general wasn’t very great. Walt Disney did develop some of the best technological advances in this field but it was nothing compared to what we have these days.

The iconic scene

It took 5 animators a time of more than 2 years to create the 2 and half minute Wildebeest Stampede scene. This scene was praised for the flawless animation flaw and dynamics. Not even halfway through the film, Simba gets trapped in a Wildebeest Stampede and is rescued by his dad, became the highlight moment of this film’s animation story. A team of 5 people taken from the original 600 artists and then they drew and shaded this scene which later was digitized over the screen. The studio became like an animation centre because people were learning new things while working on this film.

Fortunately, it takes way less time to produce a standard animation of 60 seconds, which takes not more than a couple of weeks (depending on the quality and content).

Before starting the process of animation, each character was separately assigned a supervisor. These animation supervisors then individually started working on the character development.

Some more interesting facts

A team of over 600 artists collaborated together to make this film a reality. The technique used in this film was more or less similar to what was at that time used in all Disney films with a few technical exceptions. The realization of growing animation courses’ scope became crystal clear to the audience at that time. It was a revolutionizing time in the history of animation.