Cinema and animation (and video game
creation) are just a few of the fields where a large group of creative,
talented, and (one would suppose) highly intelligent people can come together
to create something better than perhaps all of them could create individually.
(There are exceptions – Tolkien, for
example.) This is especially true of those media meant for mass consumption by
an extremely wide and varied audience, one number in the millions, each
demographic within that diverse group with widely differing tastes and
preferences. Therefore, it’s no mean thing to please a large percentage of them
at any give time.
Disney’s The Lion King, (originally
released in 1994) was and remains just such a project. Even though it had a
less than auspicious origin, (it may have been plagiarized)
it quickly rose to become an all-time favorite for the studio and its massive audience,
immediately ranking it on equal footing with the near-hallowed Disney classics
of past decades.
After ‘allegedly’ pilfering the storyline from an obscure
Japanimation feature entitled Kimba
the White Lion Cub, (the evidence is
overwhelming) Disney recruited the very best animators, voice actors,
writers, directors, and set designers they could find. That creative team
included signing on Sir Elton John and other musical artists both locally and
abroad (mostly Africa) to bring together storyboards, characterizations, and the
award-winning score, including a CD full of catchy tunes.
The attached video, featuring Elton John and an entire
studio of backup/choral singers (and even a lion cub AND a full-grown male
lion) gives a revealing peek into the sheer joy of the creative process, especially
as personified by Elton himself, singing his own song, Circle of Life.
We humans are an adversarial lot, both with ourselves, and
each other. But sometimes, just sometimes, the things that we can come together
to create, across all the human-made boundaries of race, religion, creed, sex
and gender preferences, politics, and even geography – can be nothing less than
miraculous, inspiring, and totally amazing.
Even more amazing is the fact that whenever we do, we tend
to reach a much wider audience than we would without all that creative diversity.
