I believe that, in reality, animals DO understand eachother's speaking, so why not in the movie? And, the audience must understand it as well. Try watching TLK with sound off
. Or any movie. Or just with subtitles. It's not the same, right? So, basically, they understand eachother, you can hear them, but it's much more likely that it's "lionish" what they are speaking, and if (hypotetically) you met those in real life, you wouldn't understand a word. On the other hand, story is human based, but still, the characters are animals. They are no humans. And can't be watched as humans. They are much better than that

And, in many Disney movies where animals appear together with humans, we can hear the animals but human characters can't.





