Why Simba from The Lion King is terrible

I love The Lion King. It is one of the earliest movies I remember watching, and many scenes and moments from it have remained with me throughout the years. The score is stellar, the themes are intense and the animation is fantastic. You will find this film in many people’s top tens, not only of Disney works but of cinema in general, and with good reason.

But for all the goodwill I have towards this movie and for all the deserved praise it gets, it cannot escape the criticism of adult-me, who is more pop-culture savvy and far more versed in tropes and storytelling than the child-me ever was. And as much as child-me loved Simba and wanted him to succeed, adult-me realised that Simba is in fact an awful protagonist, and a terrible character of fiction.

To quickly recap in case it has been too long since your last viewing of the movie, Simba starts out as a cub, son of the legitimate king of the Pridelands Mufasa. Mufasa is murdered by his treacherous brother Scar and Simba is banished for years while his uncle takes over the kingdom with the help of greedy hyenas. This causes the Pridelands to grow desolate and barren until Simba triumphantly returns, defeats his evil uncle, takes the throne and restores the land to its former glory. It is a heartwarming story, undercut by one realisation:

Simba did nothing to help the plot move along. From beginning to end, he lacks any agency and everything that happens is so because of the actions or at the instigation of other characters.

Let us run down what Simba does, shall we? First of all, he hatches a plan to go play in the Elephant Graveyard, except it isn’t his idea but it is given to him, inception-style, by his uncle Scar as a ruse to try and kill him. Once he is in danger, Mufasa has to rescue him. The same happens later, when Scar again tells him to hang out in the canyon and Mufasa again must save Simba from a stampede. After Mufasa’s very sad death, Simba is told by Scar to run away and never come back, and he escapes the hyenas sent to kill him not through his own means but because they are comically incompetent. He then has to be rescued (notice a pattern here?) by Timon and Pumba from encircling vultures, and is raised by them. As an adult, he finally makes the journey back to confront his uncle, but only after three other characters tell him to: his childhood friend Nala, the weird mystic Rafiki and the ghost of his dead father. In the finale, Scar promptly beats him and Simba is nearly done for until his uncle needlessly reveals that he was the one that killed Mufasa, which is the catalyst needed to turn the fight around. Even then, Scar’s ultimate demise does not come because of our protagonist, but because he tries to blame the hyenas and is killed by them.

At no point does Simba directly affect what happens of his own free will. He is a vessel for the movie’s events, but not his own agent. Sure, he is a child throughout most of it, but there is no shortage of movies where children act and affect the plot in positive ways. Simba is a stand-in and can be effectively be replaced by a cardboard cut-out carried around by the other characters in lieu of a real protagonist.

This is a real issue, in movies and in fiction in general. It is common to decry the lack of agency of female characters, for example, and rightly so, but the problem is perhaps more widespread than that. Every story that revolves around prophecy and fate implicitly admits that choice is irrelevant, and what happens is predetermined. Some people are heroes and will win, and some are villains and will lose, and there is no way of changing it. That is hardly a good lesson in fiction.

But it is even worse in The Lion King. While the concept of “destiny” and the troubling implications this has for personal agency can be more easily set aside in a story set in a fantasy or sci-fi world, it becomes instead deeply entwined with classism and elitism in this particular instance. Why does Simba succeed? He doesn’t earn his victories through skills or actions that win the day; in fact, he barely does anything at all. The only thing that he contributes is his presence and status as legitimate royal heir.

The Pridelands turn fallow and desolate as a reflection of the fact that Scar is not the rightful ruler; sure, it’s also because he lets the hyenas run rampant, but this is compounded by a drought which can hardly be controlled by wildlife animals, and is obviously symbolic. Setting aside the fact that alternating periods of boom and bust between prey and predator are a biological inevitability and thus not imputable to Scar, the Pridelands suffer his rule because he is evil; but the moment Simba is crowned king, the life-giving rains come back, returning the land to a fertile and prosperous state essentially overnight.

The whole movie becomes a huge endorsement of monarchy, unsurprising for something called The Lion King. The film claims that some people are better than others by birth, and whole world order depends on these people being in charge. Mufasa is presented as a benevolent ruler, but he has banished an entire species to live in a barren graveyard for unspecified reasons, and this decision is never explained or challenged. Hyenas are bad, that’s just how it is, and they get to struggle and starve while the lions live large. I am not the first one to point out the unfortunate implications and uncomfortable parallels that can be drawn from this arrangement, but it becomes even more troubling in light of how Simba does nothing to deserve his happy ending, and yet it is handed to him because of the circumstances of this birth.

Scar befriended and fed the hyenas, gained their trust and support, schemed and acted in order to advance his goals. For all his evil monologuing and fratricide, Scar actually drives his own life forward and obtains what he wants, and yet nature punishes him because he is not “the rightful ruler”. Simba does nothing of his own volition but solves the plot by simply existing. Other characters’ actions, for good and for bad, determine what happens, but, the film says, Simba’s innate characteristics are what really matters.

That is not a good protagonist. That is not a good message. Every movie where the the heroes are driven by destiny is already dubious, but to pair this with a complete lack of agency and an easily misapplied lesson on elitism is to reinforce bad behaviour and ideas.

This reflection should not come across as excessively critical. For all its faults, the movie remains a hugely entertaining and watchable one, and there are plenty of positive takeaways about friendship and family, hope and loss, courage and fear. I didn’t notice Simba’s pointlessness when I was a child, and I probably didn’t internalise the lesson that only true kings get to succeed; in fact, I don’t know if anyone does.

But as an adult I am led to turn a more critical eye on the media I consume and the things I love, where I can discover hidden symbolism and messages that I didn’t catch as a child. Did the makers of The Lion King intend to advocate for monarchy and classism? Probably not, and yet it came through unconsciously. Such biases can permeate every story we read and direct the way we perceive the world; recognising them even in children’s movies is the first step in identifying where they come from, what they entail, and how they can be fought.