Roger Allers trusted animated family films with serious feeling, and we rate his willingness to let a landscape or a voice carry it. The Lion King is the strong case for him, despite the lectures and emphatic music.
Fi1m perspective
In The Lion King (1994), Allers and co-director Rob Minkoff let us look at the landscape without immediately supplying a joke. Chris Sanders’s production design gives the animals surroundings that seem to continue beyond the scene. The hand-drawn animation makes the film’s grandeur feel earned. This is the Allers we value: patient enough to let a picture interest us, and willing to take a family audience seriously.
Before co-directing it, he was head of story on Beauty and the Beast (1991) and contributed story to Aladdin (1992). That work is worth remembering when considering the clarity of The Lion King’s family drama. The family relationships give its lessons about responsibility some weight, and its humour keeps the teaching bearable. The difficulty comes when Allers and Minkoff keep explaining what the animation and performances have already made clear.
We were moved by The Lion King because the voices make its family relationships feel warm and consequential. Hans Zimmer’s score sometimes makes those feelings unnecessarily ceremonial, pressing the seriousness after the performers have done enough. Allers had pushed for Zimmer and African voices, so music was plainly important to his conception of the film. The scale of the score suits that ambition, but we would have welcomed more trust in the acting. His willingness to ask for strong feeling is admirable; his insistence on underlining it is less useful.
After The Lion King, studio interference complicated his work on Kingdom of the Sun, which was reworked as The Emperor’s New Groove (2000). His later directing included Open Season (2006) and the short The Little Matchgirl (2006). He also wrote and directed Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (2014).
There is a limit to how much wisdom we want delivered by animals. In The Lion King, the humour and expressive drawing keep the solemnity from taking over. Start there, and allow for the occasions when an absorbing family drama stops to make sure its lesson has been understood.
Biography
Roger Allers (29 June 1949 – 17 January 2026) was an American director, writer, animator and storyboard artist. He co-directed the 1994 Disney animated feature The Lion King with Rob Minkoff.
Allers contributed to the story of Aladdin (1992) and served as head of story on Beauty and the Beast (1991). He also worked on earlier Disney projects including The Little Mermaid (1989) and Oliver & Company (1988). He wrote the book for the stage adaptation of The Lion King, which opened on Broadway in 1997.
Later credits include directing the Sony animated film Open Season (2006) and the short The Little Matchgirl (2006).
