In a 2017 interview with Collider, “The Lion King” co-director Rob Minkoff talked about Jeffrey Katzenberg having very superior hopes for “Pocahontas” at the time of its progress, believing it could be a really serious contender at the Academy Awards. “The Lion King,” on the other hand, was described by Katzenberg as an “experiment” early on, which in its personal way was liberating for the reason that, as Minoff reasoned, it freed him and his generation group up to consider and make some thing actually ground-breaking:
“Actually, Jeffrey Katzenberg quite famously talked about Pocahontas and Lion King [while they] ended up in production at the identical time. He mentioned, ‘Pocahontas is West Side Tale fulfills Dances With Wolves.’ He reported, ‘Lion King, on the other hand, is an experiment. So we do not definitely know.’ But the reality that he allowed us to make a film with no genuine precedent, with no serious system… Simply because in Hollywood specifically, people appreciate a system, right? It truly is a guidepost. If you fully grasp the principles, it truly is like, that’s what you are meant to do. Quickly, if you don’t have a system — everyone desires a system, but if you you should not have it, you genuinely are pressured to do one thing various.”
While it would conclude up bearing a disconcerting resemblance to more mature animated initiatives (not to mention a certain medieval Scandinavian myth and William Shakespeare perform), “The Lion King” was normally anything of a departure from Disney’s system at the time, like Minkoff pointed out. In a different significant change from tradition, the film was still in the middle of creation when Disney got the ball rolling on “Pocahontas.” This was all a bid on Katzenberg’s section to get the studio releasing a new animated film each individual calendar year, which it had hardly ever carried out constantly up till that position.
