Rob Minkoff’s gift for making animated animals matter is clear in The Lion King. We rate its warmth and visual patience highly; the urge to make sure everyone has understood the lesson is less welcome.
Fi1m perspective
In The Lion King (1994), the animals have room around them, and we are allowed time to look. Rob Minkoff and co-director Roger Allers let the scenery hold our attention without constantly interrupting it with comedy. Chris Sanders’s production design supplies depth and scale, making these places seem to extend beyond the immediate action. The pleasure of looking survives even the more predictable stretches of the story. That patience earns much of the grandeur, and it is a strong reason to take Minkoff seriously as a director of family films.
We were moved by The Lion King: the expressive hand-drawn animation and warm vocal performances make its family relationships worth caring about. There is a fair ambition here, too: asking a family audience to consider loss and responsibility takes more care than simply keeping everyone occupied until the next joke. The film can then labour the lesson, as though the audience might have felt the right thing without learning enough from it. Hans Zimmer’s score compounds that tendency, pressing the seriousness after the performers have already conveyed it. Minkoff and Allers could trust those performances more, though the humour keeps the instruction from becoming a chore.
Minkoff’s route to that feature ran through the Roger Rabbit shorts he directed in 1989–1990. After The Lion King, Stuart Little (1999) moved him into live-action filmmaking combined with computer-generated animation, an approach he continued in its sequel. His live-action stretch also included The Haunted Mansion (2003). The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) took him into martial arts adventure with Jackie Chan and Jet Li. These changes of technique suggest a director willing to learn another way of putting a story on screen.
The return to animation took in Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014) and Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank (2022). Family audiences and animal fables remain recurring interests across those changes of technique. The Lion King also offers a useful caution about giving one director all the credit: Allers, Sanders and the performers are essential to what we admire in it. Start there, with a little patience for the lectures.
Biography
Rob Minkoff is an American director, producer and animator. He co-directed the animated feature The Lion King (1994) with Roger Allers.
Minkoff was born in Palo Alto, California, and studied character animation at the California Institute of the Arts. He began his career at Walt Disney Feature Animation in the 1980s, working on several films before directing the Roger Rabbit shorts Tummy Trouble (1989) and Roller Coaster Rabbit (1990).
His subsequent feature credits include Stuart Little (1999), Stuart Little 2 (2002), The Haunted Mansion (2003), The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), Flypaper (2011), Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014) and Paws of Fury: The Legend of Hank (2022).
