by DGFone » January 26th, 2012, 2:34 am
Again this topic? What happened to the old one?
I said in the older topic that The Lion King doesn't have a time. It could be in the past, present, or future. This is because the movie is meant to be timeless. They purposefully don't mention the time it is set at in the movie precisely to keep the year uncertain. In early drafts, the time-skip after Hakuna Matata said "Kenya 2 years later". This was later removed for good reasons - we know that The Lion King is set in Africa, but not where or when specifically. In the "Circle of Life" sequence, we see both Victoria Falls and Mt. Kilimanjaro. The distance between them is 2500 Km, or roughly 1500 Miles. There is no way that The Pridelands stretch from one to the other. These places were shown to show us that we are in Africa, not that the Pridelands are there. (Except for the shot of the elephants, you never see Mt. Kilimanjaro again for the rest of the movie).
The natural instinct is to give The Lion King a time zone, but really, it doesn't have one. It doesn't belong in an era. It is in a way more timeless than even the old fairy tales, which are generally set in the middle ages. As for the Lion King: if it's in a time when lions exist, then it works.